


August

by remedialpotions



Series: Off-Kilter [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Harry Potter & Ron Weasley Friendship, Hermione Granger & Harry Potter Friendship, Mentions of sexual activity, Pining, Strong Language, Unresolved Sexual Tension, and an owl in need of a name
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:54:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 34,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25628539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remedialpotions/pseuds/remedialpotions
Summary: What was once a near-infinite stretch of time is now dwindling so rapidly that every second needs to be counted and filled to its full potential. It’s now become imperative that I do something before she leaves, something to carry this momentum forward once she’s back at school.It’s too bad, then, that I haven’t the foggiest idea where to begin.Sequel to Off-Kilter.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley
Series: Off-Kilter [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1857763
Comments: 108
Kudos: 149





	1. Eighteen

**Author's Note:**

> So... after 3+ years of people occasionally asking for a sequel to Off-Kilter, or at least stating that they wanted more from the last chapter than where it left off (I still stand by how it leaves off), I've finally sorted out what happens next for Harry and Ginny. Once again, I have been shamelessly self-indulgent while hoping to cling to some vestiges of a plot, so if you’re here, I hope that’s what you’re into! And truly, I’ve poured my soul into this, so I desperately hope you enjoy it.
> 
> P.S. Perhaps this goes without saying, but if you have not read Off-Kilter, you should read that first. This isn’t the sort of sequel that stands alone.
> 
> P. P. S. Happy 40th, Harry!
> 
> [Playlist on Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0Et1szASA9j3DaFARsW3Qj?si=h9zlyV8CQLWQ-Vg4oBjTeQ)

In typical London fashion, the morning of my eighteenth birthday dawns foggy and grey. I don’t immediately move upon waking, instead doing the thing I always do on my birthday: trying to determine if I feel any different. 

There have been times in the past when this date, and all of its perceived significance, has struck me like a bolt of lightning. I learned I was a wizard upon turning eleven, and this time last year, I was kissing Ginny in her bedroom, a day away from life as a fugitive. And other times, it has barely registered, wholly unremarkable as it passed me by. This year, I’m expecting more of the same. Yesterday I was seventeen, today I’m eighteen, and they’re completely interchangeable. I’m still a trainee Auror, still dodging the Daily Prophet cameras anytime I step past my front steps, still living in this big, creepy house with my best mate. Nothing much has changed.

I’ve always thought birthdays are overrated. Well, I suppose I’ve always thought my own was overrated, or maybe Dudley just brainwashed me into thinking that. But I like celebrating other people’s. It was always fun, back at Hogwarts, to sneak to the kitchens with Ron to steal a cake and watch his face light up as he opened his gifts. Ron’s always been worth celebrating, Hermione too. But everyone’s got one, and I spent a good ten years of my life with mine going unnoticed, so I’m happy to let this one go the same way. Eighteen is only a milestone in the Muggle world, anyway. 

But I _am_ hungry. And if I don’t have caffeine soon, my brain will start to melt. I have no other choice: I force myself from the rumpled comfort of my bed and trek down to the kitchen. 

“Morning, sunshine!”

Ron’s beaming, freckled face is the first thing I see when I enter the kitchen, which smells of fresh coffee and frying bacon. He’s tending to a pan on the stove as Hermione flits around him, pulling plates and mugs from the cupboard. She, too, smiles broadly when she sees me and hurries around the island worktop.

“Happy birthday!” she exclaims as she tosses her arms around me in a hug. “Finally you’re awake - do you want coffee?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

As she goes about pouring a cup, I seat myself at the counter and pull the Saturday edition of the Daily Prophet towards myself. Unfortunately, my own face is what greets me from the front page, and I shove it quickly away. Undoubtedly, there’s an article either singing my praises or speculating on my personal life - actually, the two aren’t mutually exclusive, it may well be doing both - and my anxiety swells at the thought of what they might be writing. 

“Is it almost ready?” Hermione says in a low voice, sidling up behind Ron. She rises onto her toes, as if anything short of a levitation charm will make her tall enough to see over his shoulder, and curls her arms around his waist.

“A couple more minutes,” he tells her. 

With a spatula, he shifts around the contents of the pan. His back is turned to me at the moment, yet somehow I can still detect the soppy smile that surely crosses his face when Hermione lays her cheek briefly against his shoulder blade. 

As I’ve always said, it isn’t that I’m jealous of either of them specifically. They were made for each other. And I’m not naïve enough to think that everything is perfect for them, all the time. They still bicker, and occasionally I’ve heard the low mutterings and clipped tones of a brewing argument through Ron’s wall, though it’s almost always followed up by an excess of squeaking mattress springs. But at least they’ve got each other. They’re done pining for each other, done dancing around it. They’re actually doing the thing properly now. I’ve been there, with Ginny, and I just want it back. 

Hermione releases Ron from her embrace long enough to pass me my mug of coffee, then returns to him to whisper something into his ear. 

“Oh, right!” Ron turns to face me, leaning back against the counter. “So, er, I was talking to my mum earlier, when we were waiting for you to get your arse out of bed-“

“Uh oh, what?”

I just never know what to expect anymore. The last time I went to the Burrow, I ended up locked in the scullery. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, in the end, but it does put a bloke a bit on edge.

“It’s nothing bad,” says Ron. “She just wants to have a birthday dinner for you.”

“What if I don’t want a birthday dinner?”

“I don’t think she particularly cares what you want, is the thing.” Ron bites the inside of his bottom lip to stop himself laughing - and they think I can’t see it, but when Hermione discreetly presses her bare foot onto the top of his, he straightens up. “She’s all excited anyway because Charlie’s home - well, he’s in Britain anyway, picking up a Welsh Green that someone’s been keeping as an illegal pet so my mum wants everyone over anyway. Just pretend that it’s Sunday dinner, but on Friday.”

“So it’s for Charlie, then?”

It’s an appealing concept, having the focus on someone else for once, but I don’t fully trust it. I _know_ Mrs. Weasley. This is a woman who knit a sweater for a boy that she met for a grand sum of two minutes on a train platform. She’s not the type to let birthdays just slide on by.

“Well…” Ron tries not to wince - Hermione’s stepping on his foot again - but then forges on. “I think her exact words were ‘it’ll be nice to have Charlie home for Harry’s birthday’, so... do with that what you will.” 

“Ginny’ll be there too,” Hermione pipes up as though this is the most delicious news she’ll deliver all year. 

“Yeah, I reckoned so,” I reply, “since she lives there.”

Just as I speak, a thrill of horror rushes through me. The very idea, unlikely as it is, of Ginny actually being so repulsed by my presence that she leaves her own home - Merlin, I don’t think I’d ever recover.

“So you’ll go, then?” adds Ron with an expectant raise of his brows. 

As if I ever had a choice. As if I’d ever do that to Mr. and Mrs. Weasley. It isn’t that I don’t appreciate it, because I do, I really do, but everyone hasn’t got to gather round just because of me.

“Yeah,” I say, trying to sound casual. “Yeah, sure.”

Now annoyingly smug, Ron returns to tending the frying bacon. 

It’s quiet then, for a bit. As Ron and Hermione continue fixing breakfast, I start sifting through a stack of old post, making a pile of interview requests to burn in the hearth. Most of the post I get these days is for things I’d rather ignore entirely, or things of no real relevance to me: adverts for the newest Cleansweep model, a voucher for a discount on self-stirring cauldrons at Potage’s. It’s a bit exhausting, actually, to contend with day in and day out. It’s always the same, so even as time marches steadily by, it contributes to the sense that I’m stuck in place.

Silly, really, that post should have such an effect on me, but these days, most everything does.

We all sit down at the kitchen to plates piled high with fried eggs, bacon, and crispy toast and the conversation turns casual. As we eat, Hermione shares that she’s expected at breakfast with her grandparents tomorrow morning, which means she won’t be spending the night at Grimmauld Place, and I watch Ron fight to hide his disappointment. He’s been counting down the days, with building dread, until she goes back to Hogwarts. 

To be honest, I’m dreading it too. Not just for Ron’s sake, but my own: Ginny being hundreds of miles away, behind near-impenetrable castle walls, does not bode well for me.

“Anyway,” says Hermione, once she’s finished a long-winded explanation about how her grandparents don’t know she’s a witch, and the resulting web of lies she’s had to weave, “Harry, we wanted to-“ She looks over at Ron, and they engage briefly in one of their trademark silent conversations. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was Legilimency, only Hermione thinks that’s a ‘disgusting human rights violation’ and Ron thinks it’s ‘creepy’, and they’re both right. “Should we tell him?”

“Tell me what?” I ask, nerves spiking. “What happened?”

“It’s nothing bad,” says Ron for the second time that morning. 

“You lot always act like you’re about to give me some horrible news all the time,” I tell them, a bit more sharply than intended. “Whatever it is, you can just say it.”

One of these days I’ll have to figure out how to stop being on high alert all the time. 

“All right,” says Ron, glossing over the sticky moment in that easy way of his. “We want to get you a birthday gift-“

“No,” I interrupt, “you really don’t need to do that-“

“We want to,” interjects Hermione. “And we thought - if you want - we could get you a new owl.”

Whatever I expected to hear, it isn’t this. “An owl?”

“Only if you want,” Ron hurries to add. “I don’t mind sharing Pig.”

“It’s not like I’ve got anyone to write to,” I say, aware how pitiful the words sound as they leave my lips. There’s a little optimistic voice in the back of my head saying that maybe I could write to Ginny, at Hogwarts, on the very slim chance that she would want to hear from me, but I ignore it. “Besides, I can’t let you do that-“

“Sure you can-“

“Owls are expensive, it’s way too much.”

“Well, it’d be from both of us.”

Ron looks entirely too pleased about being part of a couple that gives joint gifts. He and Hermione exchange a soppy look as I pick up my mug of coffee and drink deeply to buy myself time.

Truth be told, I don’t know what I want. I don’t know if there’s an appropriate mourning period for one’s mail-carrying pet. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen anyone close to me grieve for a pet. Dudley’d had a turtle that he grew bored of within a week and ‘set free’ in the garden at Privet Drive, and Scabbers didn’t so much die as he did return to his true human form, so there was less grief then and more... horror and shock. I haven’t given much consideration to replacing Hedwig at all.

“Maybe,” I say finally, because they look so earnest and hopeful. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to look.”

Hermione beams at me. “Then we’ll go today.”

An hour later, we’re in Diagon Alley, and the clouds are just beginning to part so that the sun can peek through. It’s crowded, like it always is, and I’m constantly scanning the waves of faces for the glint of a camera lens in the light. Not that I know what I’ll do if I notice one. It’s not as if I can just duck and hide: they’ll have a bloody field day with that. 

The Magical Menagerie, when we get there, is teeming with eleven-year-olds and their parents. The excitement is plain on their innocent faces as they scurry about the shop, poking fingers through the wires of owlet cages and gathering around a litter of kneazle kittens. It’s so busy, actually, that nobody seems to notice when we walk in.

“So,” Hermione begins, all business as usual. “What sort of owl do you think you want?”

I share a look with Ron over her head. “Er...” As if I’ve given any consideration to this before today. “One that flies.”

Ron rubs a finger across his upper lip to keep from laughing. “Great idea, mate.”

Undeterred, Hermione simply drags me by the arm to the back of the shop, where the entire wall is lined with cages. They’ve got everything from miniature Scops owls to massive Great Greys. Some look like they’ve just hatched, just little balls of feathers with gleaming eyes and razor-sharp beaks. A little boy with curly black hair, already dressed in his brand-new Hogwarts robes, pushes his way to the front, eyes wide with wonder.

I was never one of these kids. I wasn’t even there when Hagrid bought me Hedwig, who constituted my first birthday present in ten years. And she was more than just a way to send letters. She was my only link to the wizarding world, my only companion during the long, brutal summer interludes at Privet Drive. I wish she wouldn’t have died the way she did.

What would I even call a new owl?

“Great Horned owls are great for flying long distances,” Hermione says, standing on tiptoe to look more closely at a massive, very stern-looking bird. 

“Where do you think I’m sending letters, exactly?”

Hermione gives an exaggerated shrug and walks a little further down, as Ron shoots me another look that’s almost apologetic.

“Okay, well, barn owls are really fast,” Hermione continues, tapping her finger against the label on the bottom of another cage. “Great for making short trips, and also really friendly-“

But my eye lands on the price tag. “Twenty-five Galleons?!” I exclaim, horrified. “No, absolutely not.”

“We know what they cost,” is all Hermione has to say in response.

I look round for Ron, hoping he’ll join me in seeing sense, but he’s clear across the room now, having gravitated towards a pen containing a fresh litter of crup puppies.

So I continue down the row of cages, silently evaluating each bird in my mind. The eagle owls give off a distinct sense that they might claw someone’s eyes out if not given their way. The prairie owls are bursting with energy, hopping wildly in their cages. The Scops owls are out of the question; Pigwidgeon would lose his fluffy little head with jealousy.

But the snowy owls… they’re so calm, so mellow, napping despite the chaos of the shop with their heads tucked under their wings. There’s a quiet dignity about them that reminds me of Hedwig and everything she meant to me. One of them looks a bit younger than the rest, smaller, with soft feathers. 

Hermione sidles up beside me; the excitement radiating off of her is palpable. “See something you like?” 

I want to give her a withering look, but I can’t quite muster it. “Maybe.”

“Oh, I _knew_ it!” she exclaims, clasping her hands together in delight. “See, you didn’t want to come here, but now that you have, you want one, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I concede, “I actually do.”

She lets out a delighted squeal, ignoring the many heads that turn, and darts across the shop. “Ron!” 

When she’s done dragging Ron away from the crup puppies, Hermione beckons over a shop attendant, who extracts the smallest snowy owl from the cage so I can meet him properly. I never went through this with Hedwig. Hagrid just picked her out for me, and I was so young and small and elated by my changing circumstances that I hadn’t questioned it. But immediately I feel good about this. As the owl perches on my arm, claws sinking lightly into my bare skin, his yellow eyes pierce curiously into mine. By all logic, this reminder of Hedwig should be painful. I should want to storm out of the shop with Hermione and Ron following guiltily along in my wake.

But it doesn’t feel like replacing her. It doesn’t feel like forgetting. If anything, it’s just another way to remember her.

“All right,” I say eventually as I feed him an Owl Treat out of my palm. “I think I’ve made up my mind.”

Hermione beams so brightly at me that her face looks fit to split in half.

As we walk towards the till, I see Ron reaching into the pocket of his jeans, and before I can stop myself, I’m swatting him on the forearm. “Don’t worry about it.”

He frowns at me. “Don’t worry about what?”

“It - it’s fine. I’ll pay.”

The scowl marring his freckled face only deepens. “Wha - _mate_. You can’t buy your own birthday gift.”

Detecting conflict, Hermione is on my opposite side in an instant with a manic, pleading look in her eyes. “We want to do it, Harry-”

“I know that, but you really don’t have to.”

“Would you stop saying that?” interjects Ron, exasperated. “Look, I’ve got an income now, I can actually afford to get you a gift.”

It’s my turn to be puzzled. “You’ve always got me gifts before-”

“Yeah, but they were never any good, were they?”

I shrug, recalling a pocket Sneakoscope, a box of Honeydukes chocolate, a book on how to charm witches. “I thought they were.” 

Truth be told, I was never terribly concerned with what I actually received. Even years after befriending Ron and Hermione and the Weasleys, I was always a little bit amazed that anyone was giving me a gift at all, regardless of the occasion. When it’s ingrained in you for ten years that you’re simply not worth the time or money or effort, it’s hard to believe anyone would think otherwise. Even if those people are Ron and Hermione.

And even when those people are staring me down in the middle of the Magical Menagerie, their twin stares daring me to defy them. 

“I’m just glad you brought me here,” I add when it’s clear they’re not going to break this little standoff. “I just needed the push to do it. That can be the gift, all right?”

Ron folds his arms over his chest, glances at Hermione, then me, then scoffs. “Yeah, nice try.”

He turns on his heel and darts towards the till, sidestepping a gaggle of preteen girls with puffskeins in their hands, and is transacting business with the shop attendant before I can say another word. 

Hermione gives me an maddeningly self-satisfied smile. “Happy birthday, Harry.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I mutter again. “Fine, then, I’ll just-” I’ll just what? Secretly add Galleons to his Gringotts vault, as if he doesn’t check the statements religiously? “I’ll just have to make up for it at Christmas.”

Ron laughs at me over his shoulder. “Shaking in my boots over here, mate.”

Ten minutes later, once I’ve finished profusely thanking them (along with insistences that it wasn’t necessary) we’re walking down Diagon Alley and I still can’t believe that I’m carrying an enormous wire cage housing a snowy owl once again. It’s a good kind of disbelief, though. The positive, happy kind.

“Dammit,” Ron mutters, and Hermione and I turn to look at him. “We should have brought Crookshanks with,” he says as if that’s any clarification. “Just to check him out, make sure he’s actually an owl.”

Rising on tiptoe, Hermione pulls his head down so she can plant a loud, smacking kiss on his cheek.   
  
“What?” he asks, though he’s flushed crimson and looks rather pleased with himself. “I just don’t want to make that same mistake again, do you?”

•••

Everywhere I go, I look for Ginny. I find myself wondering what she’d say or do if she were with me, and looking for her face even in crowds that I know she won’t be in. She embedded herself into my brain years ago and there’s no undoing it. Even when I try not to think about her, she’s always on my mind. 

And at the Burrow, she’s inescapable. 

The evening is warm and breezy, and when we Apparate to the garden, most of the family is already outside. Mrs. Weasley stops laying the long, wooden table and hurries over to dole out hugs and birthday wishes. Mr. Weasley presses icy bottles of butterbeer into our hands, embraces Hermione, and claps Ron and me on the back. 

All I see is Ginny. She’s sat at the opposite end of the table, her long hair hanging over one shoulder. Even as Charlie bounds over to greet us, a friendly smile on his broad, tanned face, my eyes keep darting over to her. I don’t feel the same soul-gripping anxiety that I might have felt a few weeks ago, but to be in her presence still makes me nervous, tongue-tied, awkward. She’s only just across the garden, but the distance is making itself known in a way it never has before.

Ron and Hermione are pulled almost instantly into a conversation with Charlie about the dragon he’s bringing back to his sanctuary. I hang on the periphery of the little circle we form, half-listening, not speaking. It’s not that I don’t find it interesting, but when I know Ginny’s in the vicinity, she’s all I can think about. I still don’t quite know what to say to her, or how to act, or what to do. We’re in this weird halfway state, where I know that she no longer wants to actively hex me, but I’m also not sure if that means she wants me to approach her, or just let her be. I almost feel like I’m dealing with a skittish cat and one wrong move could scare her off completely.

Though I’m sure by now that very little scares Ginny at all.

It’s just as I’m stealing another glance that she turns towards us, though, and our eyes meet. I offer a smile, just a casual one, like the very sight of her isn’t making my stomach shake, and to my pleasant surprise, she smiles back. It’s not the blazing look she used to give me, in that other lifetime known as the last three weeks of sixth year. But it also doesn’t look like she wants to set me on fire anymore - that’s a _different_ sort of blazing look - so maybe not all hope is lost. 

“Harry?” calls Mrs. Weasley from the back door. “Can you come inside for a moment, dear?”

As she beckons kindly to me, I cross the garden and climb the steps into the house. It smells wonderful, like roasting vegetables and garlic with the faintly sweet undertones of the treacle tart that I expect will be served for pudding. But I have only a moment to think about food, because what’s actually waiting for me in the kitchen knocks the breath from my chest.

It isn’t a gift, not really. It’s so much better.

An older woman with long, black hair and dark eyes is seated at the kitchen table. In her arms is a wriggling little infant, his small round head topped with turquoise hair. 

Teddy.

I haven’t seen Teddy in - well, longer than I’m proud of. He was just days old when all the funerals were taking place, and I’ll never forget how he screamed and wailed all through Remus and Tonks’ burials. Back then, the guilt was so fresh and so sharp that I couldn’t even look at him. The whole time he was crying, I just kept thinking _I did this to you, I did this to you_. I’m meant to be his godfather and look after him, but what I really am is a shell-shocked teenager who’s never held a baby before. I’ve written to Andromeda a few times, asking if I can see him - just see him, just so I’ll know that his brand-new life isn’t completely ruined - but it’s been weeks. He’s grown so much.

“Hello, Harry,” says Andromeda quietly, adjusting Teddy’s little onesie on his shoulders, making sure it’s just right. “Happy birthday.”

“Thank you,” I manage. “Hi. How - how is he? How are you?”

“We can’t stay long,” is her reply. I guess I can’t blame her for not actually answering me. I don’t like being asked how I am either. “He’s got to have his bath tonight. But Molly thought you’d want to see him. Would you like to hold him?”

That old familiar feeling of intense gratitude for Molly Weasley swells within me. “Yes, of course - yes.” 

“Here, sweetheart, it’s easier if you’re sitting,” says Mrs. Weasley, her hands on my shoulders to guide me into a chair at the table. Once I’m seated, Andromeda rises and holds the baby out to me; his little sock-covered feet dangle in the air.

“It’s all right,” she says, more warmth in her voice now. “You can take him.”

My heart in my throat, I reach out and place my hands on either side of his small, squishy body, just below Andromeda’s. She releases him, only a bit reluctantly, and as my hands bear his full weight, I find he’s heavier than I expected. Immediately I sit him up on my lap and use my hand to support his back. 

“There you go,” says Mrs. Weasley encouragingly. “You’re a natural.”

“I don’t know about that,” I respond. I’ve never felt so out of my depth.

“Babies are easy,” Mrs. Weasley goes on, waving her wand casually at a stack of potatoes so that they begin peeling themselves. “It’s when they’re teenagers that you’ve really got your hands full.”

“I remember,” says Andromeda, her eyes never leaving Teddy. 

Guilt shoots hot-white through me, the way it did in those early days after the war when it barely felt like any sort of victory at all. She’s thinking of her daughter, her only daughter, and those memories are all she has anymore.

I revert my gaze back to Teddy. As he stares up at me with crystal-clear blue eyes, I feel a bit like I want to apologize to him. I do, silently, but I think he understands, because in that moment, his eyes go green.

•••

Despite Mrs. Weasley’s invitation to the contrary, Teddy and Andromeda leave before dinner is served. We all gather round the wooden table in the garden, and somehow I end up seated across from Ginny. Charlie’s presence is something of a novelty, so the conversation centers around him and his dragons and his mum making requests for him to just stay for a few more days (“they’ll get on fine in Romania without you”), but Ginny’s like a magnet pulling all of my focus towards her. I haven’t spent this much time with her since Hermione locked us in the scullery, and I just want it to feel easy, but I’m a rigid, anxious disaster. What if I accidentally bump my foot into hers under the table? Spill my goblet of pumpkin juice over her plate? 

More than anything, I want to go back to sixth year. I won’t be greedy - I don’t need the fleeting weeks when we were actually dating - but I miss our friendship, I miss her. She used to seek me out in the halls to tell me about something she’d read in _Quidditch_ _Quarterly_ , or we’d team up to take the piss out of Ron. She was always making little jokes that only I really understood, and she’d catch my eye from wherever she was - across the common room, maybe, or the Gryffindor table in the Great Hall - so that we could laugh about it together. She was the only person who could pull me out from within myself during fifth year when it felt like the world was ending. 

It can’t stay like this forever, can it?

There is cake - and singing - and Ron is super obnoxious on purpose about it - and as the evening stretches on, the setting sun streaks the sky with pink and gold and fairy lights pop up in the foliage surrounding the garden. It’s the sort of evening that’s warm and cozy without being stifling, and nobody seems to want to go inside yet. Little side conversations break out: Bill and Fleur with George, Charlie and his dad, Percy with his mum. I sneak away to fetch another bottle of butterbeer from the kitchen, and upon emerging, it’s not quite clear where I ought to go. At the far end of the table, Ron and Hermione are picking at a plate of biscuits together, their bare feet overlapping in the grass. They’re speaking softly, heads close, and then he leans over to kiss her on the forehead. 

I know how much they’re dreading being apart, and I also know that if I go to join them, they’ll never tell me to bugger off so they can be alone, even if that’s what they really want. Resigned, I seat myself on the steps next to the pile of old Wellington boots. 

No sooner have I done so than the hinges on the back door creak, and I turn my head to see Ginny stepping outside. Her toned, freckled legs are right at my eye-level, and to my utter shock, they bend until she’s set herself down on the rickety step beside me. 

“So.” She pries the cork out of her own bottle of butterbeer. “Birthday going well?”

I go to face her, but find I can’t: looking at her is like looking into the sun. “Yeah,” I nod, watching her pick at the label on her butterbeer with a fingernail. “Yeah, I’ve definitely had worse.”

“Really? Which one was your worst?”

“Any of the ones with the Dursleys,” I say honestly. “But probably my twelfth, that was the year they put bars on the window.”

“Oh, I remember.”

 _And it was the year you put your elbow in the butter dish_ , I want to add. _The year you couldn’t even talk to me without blushing_. It’s strange the way I used to notice her without even knowing it. She was always there, lurking on the very edges of my consciousness, and I hadn’t realized until it was almost too late. 

I don’t want that to happen again.

Ginny drinks from her bottle, then licks a stray drop of butterbeer from her bottom lip. My stomach is jumping like it’s full of Cornish pixies and my mind races so rapidly that I can’t get any of my thoughts to stick, but I desperately want her to stay. Being around her, even if it’s nerve-wracking right now, still feels so right.

“So which one was your best?” she asks.

I don’t even have to think about it. “My seventeenth.”

Her eyes cast to the grass, she nods. I know that, like me, she’s recalling that unbelievable last kiss in her bedroom, the one that carried the weight of so much more than just a goodbye. I’ve wondered countless times what it might have become had Ron not interrupted; I think I’ll always wonder.

She gives a little jerk of her head. “But you got an owl this year.”

“Oh, word’s got out, huh?”

Her brown eyes lift to meet mine, her gaze withering. “It’s all Hermione knows how to talk about.”

We laugh then, together, and the Cornish pixies in my stomach die down and now it just feels good. It feels right. For a second, with the golden sunlight and the warmth and the all-consuming affection I feel for her, I can pretend that it’s the end of sixth year all over again and she and I are lounging around behind the greenhouses. The only difference is, I don’t exactly have license anymore to go in for a snog.

“It was a good idea, the owl,” I say. “I do need to name him, though.”

Ginny sits up straight, face alight. “You know I’m amazing at naming pets.”

“Somehow, I don’t think Ron would agree with you-”

She feigns offense. “Pigwidgeon is a _beautiful_ name, and it suits him perfectly, Ron’s just an idiot,” she declares. “I’ll have a think about it. I’m sure I can come up with something.”

“I can’t wait.”

And I really can’t.

I take another drink of butterbeer and take in the scene before me. Across the garden, Hermione has scooted her chair closer to Ron’s and is now tilted against him, her head on his shoulder.

Ginny follows my line of sight, then scoffs. “They’re so disgusting,” she declares. “I don’t know how you stand living with them.”

“I only live with Ron, really, and they’re not usually this bad.” At Ginny’s skeptical quirk of a brow, I relent. “Fine, yeah, they are. It’s hard to get mad at them, though. They’re happy.”

It hangs in the air, unspoken between us. Ron and Hermione’s simple, easy bliss is a glowing light, throwing my own melancholy into sharp relief. Nobody needs a relationship or romantic love to be happy or have a full life, but the fact remains that Ginny did - does - could, again, someday - make me happy. It isn’t her fault that it’s gone now, but I can sense the gears in her head turning as she picks up on the deeper meaning. 

I’ve actually got a talent for ruining good things as soon as I have them. 

“Right. Well-“ Ginny stands, giving me another eyeful of her bare legs. “Happy birthday, anyway.”

And she’s back inside the house a second later.

The sky continues to darken into dusky blue as I sip my butterbeer and try to bolster my own self-esteem. She approached me, I remind myself. She could have walked by without a word, but she opted instead for my company. She chose me over everyone else. 

Hermione rises, crossing the garden towards Mr. and Mrs. Weasley, and I take the opportunity to steal the chair she was occupying. As I break off a piece of chocolate biscuit and pop it in my mouth, Ron narrows his eyes curiously at me. 

“What?” 

“Nothing,” he says, reaching for his own biscuit. “Just saw you talking to Ginny, that’s all.“

“Hermione’s told you to ask me about it, hasn’t she?”

“Maybe,” Ron chuckles. “Just, she said she didn’t want to pry-“

“So she has you do her dirty work for her?”

Ron says nothing, instead biting into the biscuit with a resounding crunch.

“There’s nothing to pry into,” I continue. “It wasn’t anything remarkable-“

Hermione reappears before us. “What wasn’t remarkable?” 

“I’ll tell you later,” Ron mumbles, pulling her by the hips to sit on his lap. “You sure you can’t stay a little longer?”

“No, I can’t,” she tells him, rather matter-of-fact, even as she adjusts her position on his lap to face him more fully. “I only came back over here to say bye to you.”

Her hand closes around his, fingers knitting together as though designed to do so. 

“Yeah,” Ron concedes, knowing he never really had a dog in that fight anyway. “All right, I’ll walk you.”

The protective spells over the Burrow extend dozens of yards in every direction from the house. Even with the end of the war, the Weasleys have continued to reinforce them, and one has to leave their boundaries to Disapparate, so Ron and Hermione walk hand-in-hand to the invisible border. The sky has gone dark now, a velvety black; the waning hours of my eighteenth birthday are finally upon us.

All in all, I’ve got no complaints.


	2. Agamemnon

Nobody likes August. Nobody wants it to be August. August just means that September is inching ever closer, looming in the all-too-near future, bringing with it the dismantling of everything that’s been established this summer. What was once a near-infinite stretch of time is now dwindling so rapidly that every second needs to be counted and filled to its full potential. It’s now become imperative that I do something before she leaves, something to carry this momentum forward once she’s back at school.

It’s too bad, then, that I haven’t the foggiest idea where to begin.

The evening after I turn eighteen, I’m lying on my bed, staring at a textbook and trying not to think about the way Ginny’s legs looked in those cut-off shorts when there’s a knock at my door.

“Yeah?”

The knob turns, and Ron pokes his head in. “You’ve got some post.”

As I sit up, he lobs a scroll of parchment in my direction and then watches as I break through the wax seal and begin to read. It’s vague, as is all written correspondence from the Ministry, but given the fact that I’m told to report to the Auror department within the hour and pack a change of clothes, I can rather accurately glean what’s going on: I’m being sent on a mission. A proper one. Not the little reconnaissance day trips that usually result in a stiff back and very little actual information. There might actually be perpetrators present for once. Death Eaters, even.

“Everything all right?” Ron asks, arms stretched over his head, fingertips clinging casually to the top of the door jamb. 

“Yeah,” I reply, surprised by how much I mean it. This feels good. It feels like purpose, like progress. No more treading water and biding my time. I’m actually  _ doing  _ something. “I’ve got to go to the Ministry.”

Scrambling off the bed, I grab my rucksack from the floor and pull open the drawer to my dresser. What does one even pack for their first official mission as a trainee Auror? A million ideas flash through my head, none of them sticking around long enough for me to act on them.

“The Ministry? On a Saturday night?”

I shove a few pairs of pants into my rucksack. “They’re sending me on a mission.”

Ron’s hands drop from the door jamb down to his sides. “You’re the first one!”

His ability to feel enthusiasm on my behalf is never anything short of astonishing, and I can’t help but laugh as I continue digging through drawers, pulling out socks and undershirts at random. We’ve known this would be coming: as part of the final stretch of our training, we’ve been told we’ll be taking on a more practical role. But as we won’t be fully qualified until just before Christmas, it still does come as a bit of a surprise. 

“I don’t know how much I’ll get to do,” I think aloud. “I’ll probably just be there to observe.”

“Yeah, maybe. So I guess you can’t come with me to Hermione’s house, then.”

I slide a drawer shut and turn to face Ron. “You’re going round Hermione’s?”

Owing to the distinct lack of parental supervision, he and Hermione spend the majority of their time together here at Grimmauld Place.

“Yeah,” Ron replies. “I think she feels a bit guilty, you know, she spends a lot of time here and she’s about to leave for school soon, so - but she still wants to see me, so we’re having a film night with her mum and dad.”

“I wouldn’t have gatecrashed film night with your in-laws anyway.”

Ron goes bright red in the face. “They’re not my in-laws,” he mumbles. There is an unspoken  _ yet _ at the end of that sentence that neither of us acknowledges. “And it’s not gatecrashing if Hermione’s told me to invite you.”

“Right. Well, maybe the next one,” I say noncommittally. 

“I’ve never watched a film before,” Ron realizes aloud with a note of anxiety in his voice. “What if I do it wrong?”

Chuckling, I zip my rucksack shut. “It’s not something you can really get wrong, mate.” I point across the room to where my new owl sleeps soundly in his cage, head tucked under his wing. “You’ll keep an eye on him while I’m gone?”

“Yeah, course,” Ron nods, and I step past him into the hallway. As I make my way towards the bathroom in search of my toothbrush, he follows along behind me. “What’re you calling him, anyway?”

“Don’t know yet.” I pluck my toothbrush from the holder and stuff it into a side pocket of my rucksack. “Actually, er…” In the mirror, I catch Ron’s eye. “Ginny might be coming up with a name for him. She mentioned that last night.”

“Oh, God, good luck with that,” says Ron at once. “Knowing her, she’ll end up naming it something like - like Agamemnon, or… Roger.”

“Roger?!”

“I don’t know,” he admits with a laugh. “I’m a bit stressed out here, all right? I thought I’d have you as a buffer tonight.”

“I’m not sure what you’re worried about,” I say as we proceed back into the hallway and down the stairs. “Hermione’s parents like you, don’t they?”

“Yeah, I mean, she says they do, I guess I believe her, but…” He grimaces. “I’m still the bloke who’s shagging their daughter, right? They’re bound to judge a little, and I just don’t want them to think I’m this weird wizard that they can’t understand. I’m already clearly punching well above my weight with her-”

“It’ll be fine,” I assure him as we reach the landing on the ground floor. “Just don’t talk too much during the film, it makes it hard to pay attention.”

He nods seriously. “Got it.”

I pat my back pocket to be certain that I have my wand, and then head to the front door. “Let me know how it goes. I’ll be back in… a few days, I reckon. They didn’t say.”

“All right, good luck. I’ll look after little Agamemnon for you-”

“He’s not called Agamemnon-”

“Roger, then.” As I roll my eyes, Ron gives me a wide, obnoxious grin. “See you later, mate.”

•••

It’s not until early Wednesday morning that I return, bone-tired and a little bit bruised but utterly satisfied. The thing I learned about Auror missions is that they’re shockingly boring save for a few adrenaline-flooded, terrifying moments, but those moments are just what I need. The purpose, the sense of accomplishment, the knowledge that I’ve made some sort of positive impact, they’re all the reasons that I wanted to be an Auror in the first place. To keep fighting off darkness - rather than being sat in a classroom like I have been all summer, learning about how to be good enough to fight off darkness - feels like a wonderful return to myself.

Plus, we actually came out ahead. They were small-time Death Eaters, nobody in Voldemort’s inner circle, but as most of Voldemort’s inner circle is currently in Azkaban awaiting trial, they’d been trying to reenergize the movement. Emphasis on trying, because they’re in Azkaban now too.

The sun is just barely rising as I haul myself into the bathroom and let the shower rinse away days of caked-on dirt and sweat. When my fingertips have gone wrinkly from the hot water, I exit, pull on some semblance of pyjamas - joggers and an old white t-shirt - and deposit myself happily into my bed. The clicking of my nameless owl’s beak as he nibbles on an Owl Treat is the only sound in the room as I hug my pillow and let myself drift off.

Hours later, I’m pulled slowly back to consciousness by the sound of knocking on my door. My face is smashed into the pillow, a puddle of drool under my lip. I attempt to lift my head, only to find it’s too heavy to bear, and let it fall back down again. “What?” I croak.

The door hinges creak as the knob turns. I crack one eye open to see Hermione enter, a wide grin splitting her face, and inwardly I groan. Outwardly, I simply pull the duvet up over my head.

“I’m sleeping,” I mumble, only to feel the edge of my bed dip as she seats herself upon it. 

“It’s nearly six in the evening,” says Hermione. “You can’t sleep all day-”

“Watch me.”

“We went to the Burrow on Sunday for dinner,” Hermione goes on like I’m not still buried under blankets and patently ignoring her, “and Ginny asked after you.”

_ Damn you, Hermione. _ Just like that, I’m as awake as if I’ve just chugged a cup of coffee. Pushing the blanket off my face, I rub my palm over my chin and sit up. “What do you mean? What’d she say?”

“She said, ‘where’s Harry?’”

Hermione divulges this tidbit - these two words that someone spoke three days ago - as though she’s discovered the holy grail. Maybe they just aren’t sinking into my fatigue-addled brain, but they aren’t registering as the thrilling revelation that she expects them to be.

“All right,” I say slowly, picking up my glasses from the bedside table and sliding them on. “Is that all, then?”

“Oh, Harry, don’t you see?” she says excitedly. “It means she was expecting you-”

“I think she probably wanted to know if she could expect to be locked in the scullery again,” I say pointedly. 

“But she wanted to know where you were,” Hermione goes on. “She was thinking about you.”

“Or she just assumed you lot would have brought me with you.” I push my glasses up to rub the bridge of my nose. “You’re overthinking this.”

Because I’ve learned, over the years, not to get my hopes up too high. A lifetime of loss and disappointment has taught me not to expect too much. And after days of confinement in a tent with a bunch of Aurors twice my age and little else to do but think about Ginny, and replay every single second of that conversation with her in my mind, I’ve opted just to be grateful that it happened at all. Any act of friendship from her is already more than I deserve, and that’s likely all it was. It was not necessarily the romantic moment Hermione so desperately wants it to be.

I remember, once, when the thought of Ginny rejecting me never even crossed my mind. The obstacles I faced in sixth year had all been external: her relationship with Dean Thomas, and then, once that ended, Ron’s potential disapproval and subsequent disowning of me. I never once considered that I might go for it with her, and she might let me down easy. Somehow I always imagined that if I mustered up the courage to go for it, and if Ron didn’t strangle me as a result, then that would be it. We’d be together. It was that simple.

But now over a year’s gone by, and nothing’s that simple anymore. So much has happened, and I can’t expect us to be the same people we were. I think we can still be good for each other, maybe even better than before. But it takes two, and maybe she doesn’t feel the same.

As Hermione opens her mouth to argue with me, and probably posit some ridiculous theory about Ginny’s hidden messages (“I think she was blinking in Morse code, Harry, and if I’ve translated it correctly…”), my stomach lets out a spectacular gurgle, and I realize that I haven’t eaten in nearly twenty-four hours.

“Come on downstairs,” Hermione says instead. “Ron’s gone to pick up takeaway, I’m sure he’ll be back any minute.”

“Oh, I see,” I reply, shoving the blanket off my legs. “So he left, and you took the opportunity to pester me.”

She jumps up from the bed. “I did not!” she snaps, indignant - and, honestly, protesting far too much to be believable. “I just thought you’d be hungry, that’s all.”

“Mmhmm.”

I follow her out of the room and down the stairs to the basement kitchen. In the middle of the worktop sits an open box of cereal, and I seize upon it, scooping out a handful of corn flakes and depositing them directly into my mouth. “Oh, hey,” I say, suddenly recalling the circumstances under which I left, “how was your film night? With your mum and dad, I mean.”

“Oh,” says Hermione, a tad perplexed as she opens up a cupboard and pulls out a stack of plates. “It was nice.”

“How’d Ron do?” As her head swivels round, brows knitted together, I clarify, “he was a bit nervous.”

“Well, he’s got the attention span of a fruit fly,” she says affectionately, “but we all had a nice time. My mum thinks he’s hilarious.”

“You should really tell him that.”

“Tell who what?” comes a voice from the doorway, and in walks Ron with several plastic bags hanging off his arms. Hermione bounds over to him and leans up for a kiss, and as he bends to meet her, I shovel more dry cereal into my mouth and wait for them to detach. Finally - they’re snogging like he’s returning from several months away at sea, not a ten-minute trip to the local curry place - they break apart, and Ron looks over Hermione’s head and nods at me. “You’re alive!”

“Barely.”

Ron drops the plastic bags onto the worktop with a thud. “Don’t worry, I took good care of little Agamemnon for you-”

“He’s not called Agamemnon-” 

“Roger, then,” Ron laughs. “Anyway, how’d the mission go?”

“Really good, actually...”

I spend the first half of our meal - chicken tikka masala, samosas, and enough naan to last for days - detailing the mission for Ron, who has a thousand questions and wants to know everything that happened. Hermione listens with a surprising lack of commentary, her hawk-like gaze bouncing anxiously between Ron and I. It's not difficult to imagine how her nerves will magnify once Ron has his first mission. 

I can’t stop myself wondering what Ginny would think of it all.

•••

The rest of the week passes by uneventfully, and before I know it, it’s mid-morning on Sunday and I’m dragging myself out of bed once again. Ron’s bedroom door is closed, which means they’re still sleeping or otherwise occupied, so I head down to the kitchen and start fixing breakfast. We don’t have a ton - just some eggs, a slice or two of bread, a tin of beans - but as it’s Sunday, we’ll likely be sent home from dinner at the Burrow with enough leftovers to last us the entire week. Mrs. Weasley must have a sixth sense for when we’re about to start living on pizza.

It’s not often that I ever eat a meal alone. Despite their intense coupledom, Ron and Hermione are nearly always around me, perhaps out of concern that I’ll backslide into wallowing if I’m left to my own devices for too long. These days, their concern is mostly misplaced.

But I do wonder what it would be like to have someone. To have a lazy lie-in on weekend mornings, too safe and secure in the warmth of each other to even consider leaving the bed. To cook breakfast in our pyjamas and read the Sunday Prophet together, poking fun at the gossip column and devouring the Quidditch statistics. It’s always Ginny in these fantasies; I can’t imagine having this sort of domestic intimacy with anyone else. And then I wonder if she ever thinks about it, ever considers what we could have been had a war and darkness and evil not gotten in the way. 

Ron used to do the same thing with Hermione. He’d wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t kissed Lavender Brown, or if he’d asked Hermione to the Yule Ball properly instead of as a last resort, or if he never stormed out of the tent that night. Maybe if he could have reversed time, and started things up with her sooner, everything might have been different. He doesn’t look back like that anymore - at least not aloud, to me, the way he used to - and maybe that’s because he’s got what he wants now, but maybe it’s also because it’s not worth dwelling on. It happened, and there’s no changing it. All you can do is look forward and focus on what could be, not what might have been or what never was.

No one is more surprised than me that Ron’s my benchmark for a healthy relationship, but this is the place my life has taken me.

Eventually the pair of them resurface, and by mid-afternoon, we’re Apparating over to the Burrow. I no longer get stomach-twisting anxiety at the sight of it like I used to, which is a welcome change. Mrs. Weasley ushers us inside, offering drinks and pre-dinner snacks, and of course Ron sets about passing around butterbeers and nicking a slice of cheese from the worktop. There’s no sign of Ginny yet, but as usual, I’m on high alert.

Ron pokes me on the arm. “Let’s play chess.”

“Why do you even want to play with me?” I ask even as I follow him into the sitting room. “It can’t be that much of a challenge.”

“It’s not,” replies Ron with a laugh. “But I like the chess set here.”

Just as we reach the chess table, the staircase creaks and I forget about the game entirely as Ginny descends in a loose t-shirt and denim shorts. Her hair hangs loose down her back, the ends nearly reaching her waist. Tossing out a casual greeting to us, she swipes a copy of  _ The Quibbler _ from an end table and falls onto the sofa. There’s something so effortless about everything she does: I’m sure she has no idea the easy confidence she exudes simply by existing, but I just want to drink her in. 

Unfortunately, Ron takes the seat that actually faces the sofa, so I’m left to sit with my back to Ginny. Not only can I not discreetly observe her like this, but it feels a little awkward knowing she’s staring at the back of my head.

That is, if she’s even looking this way. She probably isn’t.

“So, Ginny,” says Ron as he sets up the chessmen on the board. “I couldn’t help but notice your birthday’s coming up.”

My stomach flips. It’s not that I haven’t been aware - I have been rather acutely aware of anything having to do with Ginny Weasley for a couple years now - but given that I have no idea how to approach it, I was hoping I could linger in willful oblivion just a little bit longer.

“Nothing gets past you,” she replies, scooting over to make room for Hermione on the sofa. “So what about it?”

“So seventeen’s a big deal. Where’s the party?”

Losing a brief battle with my willpower, I glance over my shoulder to see her narrowing her eyes at Ron. “Interesting that you think you’d be invited.”

“Ahh, so there  _ is  _ a party.”

“Well… I’d been thinking of getting people together to go to the Leaky,” says Ginny, almost like it’s a confession. “But I’m the last of everyone I know to turn seventeen, so maybe that’s a bit boring at this point.”

“You won’t need to twist any arms to get people into a pub,” replies Ron as he nudges one of his pawns across the chessboard. “Doesn’t matter what the reason is.”

“Thanks,” says Ginny dryly. “I was just going to invite Luna, Demelza, Neville probably - do you lot want to come, too?”

All the chessmen on the board have turned to face me; the knight’s horse paws impatiently as though awaiting instruction. But I can hardly care less about that right now. There’s an earnesty in her invitation, a sense that it doesn’t come from a sense of obligation or politeness, but in truly wanting that company. The only problem is that I don’t know if I’m included in this. I don’t know if she’s speaking to Ron, and by extension Hermione (because they’re a packaged deal these days), or if she means all three of us. And it’s not as if I can just ask. How pathetic would that be?

“Yes, of course we’ll be there,” Hermione replies brightly. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

“Harry, you too, right?”

The Cornish pixies are back in my stomach. I shift to sit sideways in my chair so I can see her more easily and muster up a nod. “Yeah,” say, hoping my enthusiasm shines through all my nerves. “Great.”

She smiles, that effortless radiance back with a vengeance. “Oh, and I’m still thinking, by the way.”

“What?”

“For what to call your owl. It’s got to be something really good.”

“Oh, don’t bother,” pipes up Ron. “I’ve started calling him Agamemnon now-”

Ginny bursts into incredulous laughter; it lights up the whole room. “Agamemnon?!”

•••

I need to find a birthday gift for Ginny. No, not need. I  _ want _ to give her a birthday gift. Not because I’m trying to send any sort of message, or because I think it’ll get me back into her good books. I just want to give her something that might make her happy. I want to be the reason for a smile on her face.

Only problem is, I’ve no idea what that gift should be. I’m not unaware of my own status, so I know I can probably get her anything she wants in the entire world: a Firebolt, her very own pet dragon, a private Weird Sisters concert. I wouldn’t do any of these ridiculously lavish things, as it would look like nothing so much as me throwing Galleons around in an ill-advised attempt to win her back. Nothing too boyfriend-y, either, like jewelry or flowers. It’s just got to be something she’ll like. Something that’ll make her happy.

All of Sunday night is spent ruminating over this. Ideas surface and then are immediately stricken from consideration; nothing feels right. By the time Monday afternoon rolls around, I’ve made absolutely no progress at all. I go through morning classes in a daze, scribbling idly in the corners of my parchment when I ought to be taking notes, and when we’re released for our lunch break, I head with Ron down to the Ministry cafe. In stark contrast to my quiet, anxious introspection, he’s apparently had far too much coffee today and is prattling on a mile a minute, only pausing to take a breath, and certainly not long enough for me to get a word in edgewise.

“So I told Hermione,” he’s saying as we’re selecting sandwiches, packets of crisps, slightly-bruised fruit from the array of food, “why don’t we just go and  _ look _ at the crup puppies again? I mean, she barely even noticed them when we were at the Magical Menagerie with you, she was all worked up over the owls, but I think if she went and saw them again, she might actually like them, you know?”

“Mmm,” I reply with what I hope is an understanding nod. I am lightyears away from relating to purchasing a joint pet with a significant other.

“But then she says there’s no sense in us even looking,” he goes on as we step up to the till to pay. “Since she’s about to leave and all that. But it isn’t like she’ll never be back, I just think it’s worth considering, instead of her just deciding she doesn’t want one.”

At this point, I can’t  _ not  _ interject. “Well, look, if she doesn’t even want a puppy, you should probably drop it.”

“But you didn’t want an owl until you were actually in the shop looking at them,” says Ron reasonably as he accepts his change back from the till attendant. “She could go the same way.”

We find our favorite table in the back, the one that offers the least chance of people noticing and therefore bothering us, and the conversation pauses as we dig into our food. 

“Besides,” I say once or sandwiches are half-gone, “isn’t Hermione more of a cat person anyway?”

Ron gives a concessionary tilt of the head. “I s’pose, yeah. Actually, I bet that’s part of it. I doubt Crookshanks would take too kindly to a puppy.”

Briefly, I picture it: surly, squashy-faced Crookshanks faced with a gamboling, overexcited puppy. “Yeah, probably not. Though Crookshanks is going to Hogwarts with her, isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” replies Ron with a note of gloom in his voice as though he’d very much like to trade places with the cat. “But she’s not going to be there forever, and…” He takes an enormous bite of his sandwich and slowly chews. “I mean, I guess there’s the chance that… that once she’s done, we might... y’know. Find a place of our own.”

Quickly he shoves a handful of crisps into his mouth.

“Oh,” is all I can say, surprised and yet not. “Really?”

He swallows his mouthful. “Yeah, I mean, it’s come up a couple of times recently, so... yeah.”

It’s funny how you can think you know everything there is to know about a person. After seven years of friendship - of living with him more often than not - I do feel like I know everything about Ron, but he’s got this whole other side of his life that doesn’t involve me at all. Until today, I had no idea that he and Hermione talk, or argue rather, about adopting a puppy, or about properly moving in together once she finishes school. I don’t know what else they talk about or what else they’re planning, and it isn’t my business to know. But now more than ever, I see that his life is moving in a drastically different direction than mine. He’s moving forward, and I’m standing still.

“It’s not that we don’t like Grimmauld Place,” Ron adds, “because we do, honest-”

“You don’t have to like Grimmauld Place,” I assure him with a laugh. “I’m not offended.”

“No, really. It’s fine, I like living there, it’s just...”

“You want your own place.”

“Yeah,” he admits. “But it’s not for certain or anything, and it wouldn’t even happen for about a year anyway, so-”

“If you feel bad about it, don’t,” I tell him plainly. “I get it.”

“She’s just going to be gone for so long, you know?” Ron goes on, and I get the sense that he’s no longer seeking validation, just thinking aloud. “I’ll barely see her, and once she’s back, I just… want to be able to see her all the time.”

I nod my agreement. I’ve spent so much time around my best friends that it’s difficult to imagine what such a prolonged separation will be like. The war and its aftermath has driven the wizarding world to cling more tightly to each other than ever before. The dread that Ron feels over the impending departure of the Hogwarts Express is not unique; no one wants to be apart.

Suddenly it’s like the answer to my latest predicament has been staring me in the face all this time. 

“Speaking of Hermione,” I say. “Is she coming round tonight?”

Around a bite of an apple, Ron nods. “Most likely, yeah. Why?”

“I need her help with something.”


	3. Seventeen

“You’re sure you’ve got them in your bag?”

Hermione sighs and pats her small beaded purse as reassurance. “Yes.”

“And you’re sure they work?”

Another, deeper sigh, and an exchanged look of exasperation with Ron. “They haven’t been tested under all circumstances,” says Hermione, her voice carefully composed in an attempt to mask her fraying patience. “There wasn’t time. But I feel quite confident that I’ve duplicated the spellwork exactly, so they should do what you want them to do.”

“All right, sorry,” I relent. “Thank you for helping me. I really do appreciate it.”

“Oh, you’re welcome,” Hermione says, now breaking into a smile. “I’m just so happy to have helped-”

“I’m sure they’re perfect,” Ron interrupts, albeit good-naturedly. “Now can we go? Mum doesn’t like when we’re late for dinner.”

I don’t bother to argue back that Ron has never been late for a meal, ever; the anxious excitement quivering in my stomach over what lies ahead for the evening overrules everything else. No Weasley birthday is complete without a home-cooked meal by Mrs. Weasley, so we’re heading to the Burrow first, but then it’s off to Diagon Alley, and from there, the outlook is painfully uncertain. Oh, I know we’ll all end up sitting round one of those circular booths in the back of the pub, and Ginny’s brothers will buy her shots of Firewhisky, and Ron and Hermione will continue to be their disgustingly affectionate selves, but that’s about all I know.

It’s nerve-wracking to be sure, but it’s also a bit exciting in a way. There was a time when the only thing lying ahead for me was Voldemort. He was all I could see. Now that he’s gone, my future’s been cracked wide open, and that’s overwhelming at times. It’s hard to plan for anything past your eighteenth birthday when you don’t think you’ll live to see it. Now, though… I’m starting to see things take shape.

Much to Ron’s chagrin, we are among the last to arrive. The kitchen at the Burrow is packed to the brim with Weasleys and smells deliciously of toffee. Among the chatter and bubbling pots and vegetables that are slicing themselves, we find Ginny at the table with a vast array of sweets and food arranged before her.

“Happy birthday!” Hermione exclaims, grabbing her up in an enthusiastic hug. 

Ron’s next with a one-armed embrace, tousling her hair until she smacks his arm to make him let go. Ginny’s eyes lock on me, then, and tension swells between us: do I go for it? There’s nothing I wouldn’t give to hold her again, to have the flowery scent of her hair flood my nose, but it’s really not about what I want. It needs to be what we both want.

“Hey,” she says to me instead with a bright, easy smile.

“Hi,” I reply, simultaneously relieved and disappointed. “Happy birthday.”

“Yeah, well done,” Ron interjects, clapping Ginny heartily on the shoulder and instantly snapping the tension. “You’ve managed to not almost off yourself today, so you’re already ahead of me.”

“It isn’t hard,” Ginny quips back, clearing some torn wrapping paper off a chair so Hermione can sit beside her. “I know better than to eat random sweets off the floor-”

“Oi!” objects Ron, playfully indignant. “They weren’t just lying round in the dirt, they were inside a box-” He jerks a thumb in my direction. “He’s the one who was chucking things all over the room, anyway.”

“Oh, I see,” I play along. “So it’s my fault?”

“Of course not,” Hermione says fiercely, as though anyone’s being serious at all. “It’s the fault of that awful girl who tried to dose you with a love potion. They really ought to be banned, you know. They’re incredibly dangerous, not to mention unethical - to just take away someone’s autonomy like that-”

“We know,” says Ron, “we’re just having a laugh-”

“Well, I just don’t think it’s very funny…”

As her diatribe about the horrors of love potions continues (despite the fact nobody’s disagreeing with her), I drop into a chair opposite Ginny and take a couple biscuits from a dish on the table. As she moves a hand to push her hair over her shoulder, I notice something gold glinting on her freckle-dusted wrist.

“Is that new?” I ask, gesturing towards her arm. 

She looks where I’ve pointed like she’s forgotten she’s wearing it. “Oh! Yeah, it’s my coming-of-age gift from Mum and Dad. Wizards get watches, witches get bracelets,” she explains. “Though I wouldn’t have complained if I’d gotten a new broom instead.”

Her arm extends across the table towards me, and the tension rises again between us as I lean in to take a closer look. Thin, delicate gold chains weave together, adorned here and there with tiny stars that sparkle despite the low light of the kitchen. 

“I think Mum was really excited to shop for something other than a watch, though,” Ginny continues as she takes her arm back. “And I’ve been using Charlie’s old broom all summer, it’s pretty decent.”

“What kind has he got?”

“It’s just a Comet Two-Forty,” she says, reaching for her own biscuit. “But he took really good care of it, so it’s still pretty fast. It’s no Firebolt or anything, though.”

She raises her brows pointedly at me, but it isn’t challenging like it might have been a month or two ago. It’s jocular, teasing, but friendly.

“I don’t even have my Firebolt anymore,” I remind her. “It’s lost somewhere over the home counties.”

“Oh, right!” She winces sympathetically. “Have you got a new one yet?”

Casually, I shake my head. “Not yet.”

“Well, one flying thing at a time, I suppose,” she says as she takes a contemplative bite of her biscuit. “Your owl hasn’t even got a name yet.”

“You’re still thinking, huh?”

“I don’t want to rush the decision.” She laughs again, and the sound floods like warmth through my whole body. “It’s got to be something really good.”

Something knocks into my calf under the table, and I tear my eyes away from Ginny to see Hermione staring at me, eyes unblinking and sharp.  _ What _ , I mouth as subtly as possible, and she just raises her brows and then turns her gaze down to the table. I follow her line of sight to see she’s looking at her beaded bag, and her meaning becomes plain.

“Oh, right!” I blurt out, prompting curious looks from both Ginny and Ron. “Erm, so, Ginny, I actually have something for-”

But just then, Mrs. Weasley bustles over with steaming bowls of vegetable soup, and as the rest of the family joins us at the table, the moment ends before it even began.

“Nevermind,” I say to Ginny, who’s still regarding me inquisitively. “I’ll tell you later.”

•••

Despite it being a Tuesday, the Leaky Cauldron is packed nearly to the rafters when we walk inside. With more energy than I’ve seen him display in months, George bounds over to the bar and returns with a massive tray bearing pitchers of lager, glasses, and an entire bottle of Firewhiskey. 

“I told Tom that it’s a special occasion,” he explains, flicking his wand so that the pitcher of beer lifts up and begins pouring into the pint glasses. “So you’ll be well taken care of tonight, Ginny, don’t you worry.”

“Oh, believe me, I wasn’t-” As she scans the crowded pub, her face lights up. “Oh, good, there they are.”

She makes her way across the pub to a small back booth, where Luna Lovegood sits with a glass of gillywater in front of her and two pairs of Spectrespecs perched atop her head. Beside her is Neville Longbottom, who’s got his own pint of beer. They rise from their seats as Ginny approaches and greet her with enthusiastic hugs, and as George begins passing around the drinks, the three of them fall into fast, easy conversation. I’m only vaguely aware of Bill pulling up extra chairs to the booth, or the glass of Firewhiskey being pressed into my hand, or Ron guiding Hermione onto his lap when there still aren’t enough seats for everyone. All I can do is watch Ginny, watch the way she’s glowing with happiness at the sight of her friends, watch the effortlessness in their interactions, and try to stamp down the guilt roiling in my stomach.

I cannot reverse time and return to last year. The fact remains that I just up and left, without telling her a word. I had no other choice, and I stand by what I did. Still… it was a whole year of our lives. A year of her life that I didn’t experience. A year of her life when I wasn’t there for her, and other people were.

It’s no one’s fault, least of all hers, but it snaps everything back into sharp perspective. Whatever progress I might have thought I was making, it’s clear now that those casual chats over biscuits and butterbeers were only meager steps in closing a wide and gaping chasm between us. She’s everything I see, everywhere I look, occupying all the space in my mind, but I’m only on the periphery of hers. While she sits in the middle of the booth, allowing her friends and her brothers to shower her with drinks and attention, I end up on the outskirts of the group in one of those extra chairs that Bill had dragged up, more of an observer than an actual participant.

Still, I figure that the party has to thin out eventually - at one point, the whole of Dumbledore’s Army and Gryffindor Quidditch are crammed into this far corner of the pub - and maybe I’ll have my moment with her then. Her gift still burns a hole in my pocket (or rather, Hermione’s bag, but I’m still thinking of it), but I don’t fancy making a big presentation in front of everyone. It isn’t about making a statement or sending any sort of message. I really do just genuinely want her to have it. And until then, I’m content to sit back, nurse my glass of Firewhiskey, endure George’s ribbing about said conservative drinking, and watch for an opening.

“My money’s on Peru,” Ron says loudly, leaning around Hermione to pour himself another beer. “They made it all the way to the semi-final last time, and they only lost because Ireland were so good-”

“And yet,” George interjects, exchanging grins with Angelina Johnson and Lee Jordan. “I seem to recall you supporting Bulgaria that year.”

Ron shrugs dismissively. “I doubt Bulgaria will even make it to the quarterfinals this time.”

“But they’ve got some new Chasers,” says Angelina fairly. “And they’ve still got Krum.”

“Yeah, but he’s getting old, isn’t he?”

From her perch on Ron’s knee, Hermione rolls her eyes with a disbelieving shake of her head. “He’s hardly old, he’s only just turned twenty-two.”

He peers around her shoulder to look at her in alarm. “How do you know that?”

“It’s just simple maths, Ron…”

I’ve almost forgotten about the Quidditch World Cup entirely. For obvious reasons, England isn’t participating, but because Voldemort’s reign of terror hadn’t spread past the United Kingdom, the rest of the wizarding community had carried on recruiting athletes and hosting matches. It boggles my mind that while I was on the run, and the Weasleys were in hiding, and the Carrows reigned supreme at Hogwarts, for most people, life hardly changed at all. 

Sometimes I wonder, if we hadn’t won, just how bad it would have got. 

“It’ll either be Peru or Japan,” Ginny chimes into the discussion at some point, earning herself an appreciative nod from Ron. “Japan have got that new Seeker, she’s meant to be really good.”

“But Seekers alone don’t win matches, Bulgaria are proof of that,” counters Lee. “You need good Chasers too.”

“Yeah, and they’ve got them…”

As Ginny launches into an explanation of Japan’s new offensive strategy, a light flush rises in her cheeks - whether from alcohol, the warmth of the pub, or her sheer passion for Quidditch, I can’t be certain. I, for one, am just happy to see her like this.

So, naturally, that’s when the first camera goes off. The sudden flash of light through the dimly-lit pub causes the hairs on the back of my neck to rise. Next to me, Ron and Hermione instantly go tense. Furtively I glance around the pub, trying to discern the source, but it’s crowded and dark and whoever the photographer is, they’re likely employing stealth magic.

“Fuck,” I hiss through gritted teeth. “Goddammit, why now?”

“Ignore it, mate,” Ron mumbles, barely loud enough to be heard, rubbing his hand over his jaw to mask the movement of his lips. “Just ignore it.”

Easier said than done. Every click of the shutter, every burst of light, every scratch of a Quick-Quotes quill against parchment, they’re all brutal reminders of exactly how abnormal my life is. That Ginny and her friends are able to sit in a pub on a Tuesday night with a pitcher of beer and argue over Quidditch is nothing short of miraculous, nothing to be taken for granted, and my presence turns it into something gossip-worthy. This night is meant to be about her, not me. 

“I’ll just go,” I decide. “If I leave, they’ll leave.”

“But you can’t!” Hermione yelps, jumping up from Ron’s lap. “You haven’t given-”

“I know,” I say, “but I’ll have to do it another time. I don't want to ruin her night.”

“Nothing’s ruined,” says Ron. “Everything’s fine, see?”

He gestures to the table, where the conversation has shifted to fond reminiscence of past Quidditch Cup victories. 

But it won’t be fine. Not once the photos are in the paper, captioned with speculation and half-truths. Not when Ginny realizes that this is what life with me around is like: constant scrutiny, no privacy, no normalcy. I should do my best to spare her before it’s too late.

“Oh, Harry,  _ don’t _ ,” Hermione objects, but I ignore her, and instead rise from my chair.

“Oi, Ginny,” I say, leaning forward and planting one hand on the table so I can be heard over the din. “I’ve got to go.”

“Already?!” Ginny is far more incredulous than I expected. “Why?”

I lean in further, lowering my voice. “There’s cameras in here.”

“So?”

“So it’ll all be in the Prophet tomorrow unless I go.”

“I don’t care,” she says baldly. “Let them say whatever they want. You can’t go yet, we’ve barely got started.” A smile flashes across her face, and then she turns to face George, who’s seated next to her. “Budge over,” she demands, pushing on his shoulder. “Go sit with Ron.”

George pulls a face of mock annoyance. “What, and watch him snog Hermione all night?”

But, to my amazement, he rises and slides out of the booth, and Ginny pats the small patch of polished wood beside her. Heart leaping into my throat, I slip in next to her. It’s small and cramped and her leg - bare, since she’s wearing shorts - is pressed against mine. 

Another flash goes off. 

“So what do you reckon they’ll write about us?” asks Ginny around a sip of her drink.

“Oh, the usual,” I reply as Ron slides a beer across the table in my direction. “Probably something about how I’m betraying Ron’s friendship by being sat here with you.”

“I thought you were betraying him by having a torrid love affair with Hermione,” she deadpans back.

“Well, I’m a really bad friend.”

Her head tips back as she laughs, and my stomach flips. Lately I’ve been making her laugh more and more, and it’s the best feeling there is.

“Yeah, you’re the worst,” she agrees, still grinning. 

I hazard a glance over at Ron and Hermione, the latter of which meets my eye and holds up her beaded bag in suggestion. Discreetly, I shake my head. Now’s not the time; I just want to enjoy this.

“So it’s my turn to ask,” I go on, eager to keep this energy between us alive. “Have you had a good birthday so far?”

“So far I have,” she replies. “I thought it would feel more exciting, though. It’s a little anticlimactic, turning seventeen.”

“You can do magic outside of school now, though,” I remind her. 

“Well…” The redness in her cheeks deepens. “I’ve been doing that all summer, actually.”

“Have you?”

“You’re the one who told me that they can’t tell who’s cast what spell,” she goes on. “There’s already so much magic going on at my house, they’d never be able to figure out if it’s Mum or Dad or me or anyone else.”

“You little rebel.” I don’t even try to hide the admiration in my voice.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. You’re an Auror now, aren’t you? You could arrest me.”

“I think I’ll let this one slide,” I reply, opting not to remind her that I’m not fully qualified and lack the authority to arrest a house elf, let alone an actual human being. “Just for you.”

Her eyes connect with mine, brown irises dark, pupils wide. I have to bite down on my lip to keep from kissing her.

Luna’s the first to leave (“the Nargles are worst for Dad at night”), followed closely by Neville, and then Hannah Abbott. One by one, Ginny hugs her guests goodbye, but always returns to the space in the booth beside me. Up until now, I’ve had only shreds of time to spend with her. Even our little bout of captivity in the scullery last month lasted hardly an hour, and that was only because Hermione was reluctant to release us. I’ve had bits of conversation here, stolen moments there, but this is the most time we’ve had together since last spring. The minutes and hours race by, and before I know, last orders are being called, and only Ron, Hermione, George, and Angelina remain. 

George jumps up from the booth. “Last orders! What does everyone want? It’s my treat.”

“Nothing,” replies Ginny, holding up a nearly-full glass of gin and tonic. “I still have this left.”

“So what I’m hearing is you want a double Firewhiskey,” says George. “Anyone else?”

“No, seriously,” Ginny objects, reaching out to swat her brother on the arm. “I’m done, I’ve got to Floo home without accidentally ending up in Wales or something.”

“Double Firewhiskeys all around, then?” 

Before anyone can argue, he’s darted off to the bar. I have the distinct sense that George will end up drinking all of these Firewhiskeys himself, and then the pub will close, and my remaining time with Ginny will dwindle down to nothing.

Across the table, Hermione is speaking directly into Ron’s ear. “Hermione,” I attempt, only to be plainly ignored. “Hey, Hermione?”

Plainly oblivious to everything around him, Ron turns and locks his lips onto hers, and beside me, Ginny lets out a disgusted groan. Picking up a coaster, she chucks it directly at Ron’s chest.

“Oi!” Ron turns, red-faced, to scowl at the pair of us. “What’s the matter with you?”

“You’re being disgusting,” says Ginny. “You’ve got to get a room, seriously.”

“Don’t you worry, we will-”

“Hermione,” I interrupt, “can I have your bag?”

Eagerly, she nods and passes it to me over the table. As Ginny watches, intrigued, I reach in up to my elbow and fossick around until my fingers close over the small paper-wrapped parcel. 

“So,” I begin, shifting in my seat to face Ginny and trying to push down how monumental this feels. I’ve never given her a gift before. “I’ve actually got a birthday present for you-”

Her jaw drops. “You have?”

“It’s nothing special, really-”

Hermione’s foot connects with my leg for the second time that day. “Don’t say that!”

“All right, she helped me with it, so she’s very invested,” I explain. “But really, don’t get your hopes up too high.”

I place the parcel onto the table in front of Ginny and do my best to ignore the thumping of my heart in my ears. If she hates it… if she gets the wrong message…

Her fingers slip under the fold and lift up the taped corners, then pull the paper away completely to reveal two rectangular mirrors, each about the size of a small book.

“They’re two-way mirrors,” I say before she can become too puzzled. “It’s something my dad and, erm, and Sirius came up when they were in school, it’s a way to communicate. You look into one, and whoever’s got the other one will be able to see and hear you. I used to have a set, actually-”

She looks back and forth between me and the mirrors, mouth slightly agape. “You told me.”

“Right. Well, anyway, you can keep one and give the other to whoever you want to talk with while you’re at Hogwarts. Luna, maybe.”

Ginny furrows her brow at me. “Luna’s going back too.”

“Then - then your mum and dad, or one of your brothers, maybe. It’s up to you.”

“These are incredible,” Ginny says softly. “You just made them?”

“Hermione helped me with the spellwork,” I’m quick to say. “Actually, she basically did the spellwork, I can’t take credit for that. I just figured that it might be really strange to be back at Hogwarts, I can hardly imagine what it’ll be like, and I thought it might make it… easier. If you could talk to your parents, or - or I don’t know, Neville-”

“Neville?!”

“Or whoever you want,” I say again. “It’ll be a lot better than writing letters.”

She sets the mirrors down. Shifts in her seat to face me more fully. Her gaze connects onto mine again, and the ruckus of the pub recedes into the background. Something’s there in her eyes again. I wouldn’t quite call it blazing, but it’s definitely… smoldering. 

It’s not nothing.

“Thank you,” she says, and then her arms are encircling my neck and I’m hugging her back, holding her, breathing her in. It’s over in seconds, but I can still feel her touch burning into my skin.

“It’s nothing much-”

“No, it’s brilliant. And I feel so bad,” she suddenly laments as George returns to the table and plunks a heavy glass filled with smoking amber liquid in front of her. “You’ve just had your birthday and I didn’t get you anything.”

“You didn’t have to. I just thought you might like these.”

“I do.”

“Besides, you’re naming my owl, aren’t you?” I grin at her. “That’s more than enough.”

Ron leans across the table, so close that his chest is nearly touching the smooth wood. “You better hurry up on that,” he tells Ginny, eyes glassy. “Or he’ll end up calling him Agamemnon like I’ve said-”

“No, no, no, you can’t do that,” Ginny says with such urgency in her voice that I can’t help but laugh. “Don’t give him the satisfaction.”

Ron lets out a gurgling chuckle. “Nah, Hermione’s got that covered - oi!” For the object of his affection has just swatted his shoulder. “What? I give it right back, don’t I?”

“We’d better get you home,” Hermione says, tugging on the sleeve of Ron’s shirt. “You need a sobering potion.”

“I’m fine,” Ron protests, even as he allows himself to be pulled from the booth. “George just brought last orders.”

“You need to go to bed.”

He smirks. “You joining me?”

With a roll of her eyes, Hermione leans over to give Ginny a quick hug. “Happy birthday again, Ginny. We’ll see you soon.”

Ginny waves them off, watching as Hermione leads Ron out of the pub. “They’ve got the right idea, honestly,” she says, disregarding George’s incredulous protest. “I don’t want Mum and Dad to worry.”

“They’ll worry no matter what,” George tells her. “You may as well finish your drink.”

“Nice try.”

We do, however, keep George and Angelina company while they finish their drinks, and as the last drops of Firewhiskey drain from George’s glass into his mouth, he rises from his seat. “Well,” he declares with a meaningful look in Angelina’s direction, “I guess I’m headed home.”

Angelina gets to her feet as well. “Yes, me too. I’m going to go too.”

“How are you getting home? The Knight Bus?” asks Ginny, and I know she’s thinking, as I am, that Angelina lives all the way in South London, and has perhaps imbibed a bit too much to Apparate safely.

“Just walking,” says George. “I’m only a few minutes away, aren’t I?”

“Well, yeah, but-”

“You two stay out of trouble,” George says, tossing a wink in our direction. He and Angelina depart the pub together, their bodies so close as they walk that their hands brush.

“Subtle,” Ginny laughs once they’ve stepped through the door. “Really subtle.”

“Are they…?”

“Not together,” says Ginny, shaking her head. “Not properly, anyway. I think they’re just… you know.”

Playfully, she grimaces.

“I see.”

“Ugh,” she groans suddenly, slouching down in her seat. “Fuck’s sake, look at the Floo. It’ll take ages to get home.”

There is, indeed, a long queue forming in front of the fireplace on the opposite end of the pub. The portly gentleman currently standing inside it keeps sprinkling his Floo powder on his hair rather than throwing it into the grate, then gazing around in confusion when he hasn’t gone anywhere.

“That could be a while,” I agree. “And you haven’t got your Apparition license yet, have you?”

I regret the words the second they leave my mouth, because instantly Ginny tenses. “There weren’t lessons last year.”

“Oh, right, I - right,” I stammer, even as I realize that I didn’t know that until just now. “Well, if you don’t want to wait, I can Apparate you home. By Side-Along, I mean.”

“But you haven’t got your license either, have you?”

“Doesn’t stop me Apparating,” I say with a grin.

She doesn’t smile back. “Well, I suppose you do get away with things, don’t you?”

Guilt grips my stomach again as her words from last month, sharp and aimed to wound, cut through my mind again:  _ I reckon  _ _ Harry thinks he can just do whatever he wants, doesn't he? _ The chasm between us, which I thought I had made progress on closing, feels split wide open again.

“But it’s a good idea,” she relents. “If you don’t mind the extra trip.”

“Not at all.”

The smile she does give me then is hesitant and close-lipped. “Thanks.”

There’s an Anti-Apparition charm over the whole of Diagon Alley, so we make our way out of the pub and into Charing Cross Road. The summer air around us is muggy and hot, so heavy that it’s difficult to take a deep breath.

“You haven’t had too much to drink, have you?” asks Ginny as we make our way down the crowded sidewalk in search of a private place to Apparate. “We’re not going to end up in Bristol or something?”

“No, I only had a couple. It’ll be fine.” As we pass by an alley, dark and narrow, I beckon to her. “Here, this should do.”

“Ooh, it’s creepy,” Ginny says with a touch of relish, taking in the dented rubbish bins and the flickering streetlight above us. “Seems like a good place to get murdered.”

“I’ll do my best not to murder you.” Taking my wand out of my back pocket, I offer my forearm to her. “Ready?”

She nods, and reaches for me, but she doesn’t take my arm. Instead her hand, small and warm, closes directly around mine. Like an instinct that I didn’t know I had, I adjust so that our palms are flush against each other.

“Hang on tight.” My voice comes out in a breath.

“I am.”

There’s a good chance I won’t be able to Apparate properly at all, the way she’s doing my head in right now. I very well could end up in Bristol or Inverness or not be able to do it at all, just be an idiot turning on the spot in an alley. 

But I squeeze her hand a bit more tightly, bring the image of the Burrow to the forefront of my mind, and twist in place.

I open my eyes to utter darkness. Above us is a inky-black sky glittering with stars and a big, glowing, almost-full moon. In the distance stands a tall, ramshackle house with oil lamps illuminating the windows. 

“Ugh.” Ginny drops my hand to push her long hair away from her face. “Not exactly pleasant, that, is it?”

“You do get used to it, but I’d still rather fly.”

“Yeah, I would too.”

We stand there, the long grass tickling our legs, and regard each other. I know the night has to end. I know she isn’t going to invite me inside for a late-night cup of tea and a chat. I know we’ve had sticky moments, little reminders that we’re not who we used to be anymore. 

I just want to be with her a little bit longer.

“Thanks again for my gift,” she says, sounding almost shy. 

“You’re welcome.”

“I should probably get inside.” She glances over at the house. “I think Mum’s waiting up.”

“All right, well then, I’ll, erm… I’ll see you…”

“Soon,” she finishes the sentence.

“Soon.”

I watch until she’s all the way inside the house, just to be absolutely sure she’s made it there safely, and then Apparate back to Grimmauld Place. Despite the late hour, there’s a buzzing in my veins, and my skin is still warm where Ginny held my hand, so sleep is a very, very long way off. I go instead down to the basement kitchen, intent on a cup of tea to ease the racing of my mind. I’m barely watching where I’m going, my mind still on Ginny, her arms around my neck, her leg pressed against mine, and at first I don’t even register the sight before me when I enter the kitchen. 

Hermione’s sat on the counter, Ron standing between her legs, and they are snogging as furiously as if this is their last night on earth. Fortunately, snogging is all they’re doing, though I expect that if I’d spent a few more minutes talking to Ginny, I’d have encountered a much different scene. 

Normally I’d just turn and leave, but I really do want a cup of tea. Pointedly, I clear my throat. When this does nothing, I change tactics.

“Oi!”

Ron jumps back, startled, and Hermione’s face goes a deep, boiling crimson.

“Oops,” Ron chuckles. “Sorry, mate.”

Hopping down from the counter, Hermione grabs Ron by the wrist and drags him out the door, carefully not making eye contact with me as she passes.

But as their footsteps pound up the staircase, the tea kettle on the stove lets out a sharp, high whistle, so at least they’ve done one thing right.

•••

I barely sleep that night. When I do manage to doze, it’s fitful and disjointed, marked by stressful dreams that I cannot recall upon waking. The trilling of my alarm in the morning comes as a welcome relief from tossing and turning in bed, and after a shower, I make my way back down to the kitchen. From the hallway, I hear quiet voices and the sizzle of frying bacon.

“Is it safe to enter?” I call, laughing to myself as I approach the doorway. “What am I about to walk in on?”

“Yes, Harry,” comes Hermione’s slightly exasperated voice. Internally I bristle at this: if anyone should be exasperated, it ought to be me, the constant third wheel.

It’s quite a different scene in the kitchen this morning. From one of the stools at the island worktop, Ron’s slumped forward, face pale and clammy, staring at a phial of a murky green substance that I recognize as hangover potion.

“All right?” I grin, helping myself to a cup of coffee from the French press. He merely grunts in response. “I thought you were supposed to take a sobering potion.”

“Got distracted,” he mumbles, and despite his pallor, his ears go pink. 

“Just drink that,” I tell him. “It works fast, you’ll feel loads better.”

He lets out a truly pitiful whimper and lets his cheek press down on the worktop. 

“I told him to take the sobering potion last night,” Hermione says to me, shaking her head disapprovingly, her hands clasped around a steaming mug of coffee. “Of course he never listens. At least you seem like you’re doing all right. How did things go after we left?”

“Fine,” I say warily. “We left pretty soon after you.”

“We?” repeats Hermione, alight with intrigue. “You mean, you left together?”

I shrug. “I Apparated her back to the Burrow-” At Hermione’s delighted gasp, I scowl. “It wasn’t like that _ , _ there was just a really long wait for the Floo at the Leaky, and it just seemed faster - stop looking at me like that-”

From the island worktop comes a strangled gag, and we both turn in alarm to see Ron holding a now-empty phial, his face screwed up in disgust. “That is  _ foul _ ,” he moans. “That’s it. I’m never drinking again.”

“Mmhmm,” says Hermione skeptically before turning back to me. “So what happened?”

“Nothing,” I say firmly. “Seriously, nothing. All I did was-”

“Oh, Harry,” pipes up Ron from the worktop, looking significantly further from death than he had thirty seconds ago. “You got some post earlier, it’s over on the table.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” says Ron as I walk over to the kitchen table and Hermione starts tending to the bacon again. “You know, you had better starting sending some post instead of just receiving it all the time, or little Agamemnon-”

“Don’t call him that-”

“-is going to start taking it personally.”

Ignoring this, I pick up a folded sheet of what looks like newsprint and flatten it out against the table. 

My lungs lose all function.

_ POTTER’S NIGHT OUT, _ reads the headline of the Daily Prophet in big black letters, and beneath that:  _ Boy-Who-Lived cozies up to best mate’s sister in shocking betrayal _

The accompanying photo is massive, taking up what I have to imagine is the entire front page. Ginny and I sit close together in that booth at the Leaky Cauldron, turned towards each other, our faces close. Even in the grainy image, the smiles on our faces are plain as day, and in the photo, her head tips back as she laughs. I watch it play on a loop, frozen, my heart in my throat… and then I notice the red ink at the bottom of the page.

_ We were right!  _

I know this handwriting, these smooth, round letters. It used to appear on notes slipped into my hand between classes inviting me to the common room at midnight, on the study guides that lay abandoned in favor of snogging behind the greenhouses. I’d recognize it anywhere.

And just like that, I can breathe again.

“Harry?” calls Hermione from across the room. “What is it?”

I tuck the paper into my pocket, wanting to keep it safe, special. Just between us. “Nothing.”


	4. The Invitation

Ron’s talking about crups again.

“What about after you’re done at Hogwarts?” he asks Hermione. She’s lounging on the sofa next to him, her toes tucked under his thigh,  _ Standard Book of Spells, Grade 7  _ open on her legs. He’s meant to be playing chess with me on this quiet Saturday night, but his main priority, clearly, is angling for a puppy. “Can we get one then?”

“We can start talking about it again,” she replies, never lifting her eyes from her book.

“Do you think you’ll have changed your mind by then?”

“Honestly?”

Ron gently nudges his pawn across the board. “Yeah.”

“I really don’t think it would go over well with Crookshanks at all.”

“We could work with him on that,” says Ron. “Maybe we can start talking to him about it now, so that he’s not surprised, or - or angry, once it actually happens-”

Hermione bursts out into warm, affectionate laughter. “That’s what you do for little kids when there’s going to be a new baby in the house. I’m not sure it works the same with crups and kneazles-”

“Half-kneazles,” Ron counters. “And Crookshanks is smart, right? I’m sure he can be reasoned with-”

His voice breaks off as a large tawny owl wings its way into the drawing room, drops a scroll onto Ron’s lap, and then soars right back out again. Hermione closes the book on her lap and sits up straight as he breaks through the red wax seal and unfurls the parchment.

“Fuck,” he mutters, eyes scanning back and forth as he reads. “I fucking knew this would fucking happen-”

“What?” asks Hermione urgently. “What is it?”

“It’s my training mission.” He turns towards her, crestfallen. “I’ve got to be there in an hour.”

“Oh.” Hermione bites her lip. “Does it say how long?”

“Course not.” He tosses the letter aside and stands up. “Guess I’ll go pack.”

“I’ll go with you,” Hermione says at once, and together - all talk of crups and half-kneazles forgotten - they leave me alone in the drawing room.

It’s not as if he doesn’t know what he signed up for, but I understand why he’s not exactly jumping for joy. He’d rather soak up his last few weeks with Hermione than spend days on end in a tent with people he barely knows.

I wonder if he’ll love it like I did.

Some time later, he appears in the doorway of the drawing room with his rucksack in his hand, apprehension plain on his face. Hermione hovers around behind him, not bothering to hide her own anxiety. “Any tips before I go?”

After considering this for a moment, I shake my head. “You’ll be fine.”

“That’s helpful, cheers,” he says dryly. “All right, well, I’ll see you… soon, I s’pose. Unless I die,” he adds with a shrug.

Hermione gasps, horrified, and swipes her hand against his shoulder. “That isn’t funny!”

They head into the hallway to say goodbye to each other privately - they don’t need me gawking at them while they kiss and say their ‘I love you’s - and as the front door clicks shut, Hermione returns to the drawing room and wordlessly picks up her textbook. Her lips are pressed very tightly together, and I get the sense she isn’t reading anything at all anymore.

“Care to finish the game of chess?” I ask, hoping to lighten the heavy silence. 

She doesn’t look up. “Not particularly.”

“He really will be fine, you know.”

“I know that.” 

Truly, I love Hermione - after Ron, she’s my best friend - but I’ve never really understood her the way I understand him. She is so often driven by logic and reason and the sheer power of her own mind, but when emotions rule, as they are right now, I almost always find myself at a loss for anything to say or do to help. With no other recourse, I begin gathering up the chess pieces.

“I’m going to bed,” says Hermione as her book closes with a thud. “I think…” Her bottom lip goes between her teeth again. “I think I’ll still stay here tonight, if that’s okay. Just because I already planned on it, so my parents aren’t expecting me home,” she explains in a rush, “and I’d have to explain about the Auror thing - and of course they know what an Auror is and what Ron’s in training for and everything, but I’m not really in the mood for the conversation-”

“It’s fine,” I interrupt, knowing that if I don’t, she’ll never stop. “You can stay here anytime.”

“I’ll just be in Ron’s room.”

“I figured.”

She stands, book in hand, and is halfway out of the room when she suddenly turns on her heel. Her sullen mood, for the moment, has vanished. “Are you excited to see Ginny tomorrow?”

I look at her like she’s suddenly sprouted a second head. “What?”

“At the Burrow.”

“Oh. I wasn’t planning on going anymore-”

“Why not?” Hermione asks this like I’ve done her a great personal wrong. “Just because Ron won’t be there doesn’t mean that you can’t. I’m sure Mrs. Weasley would still love to see you.”

On the surface, this makes perfect sense - Mrs. Weasley has never turned down an opportunity to feed me - but it just isn’t that simple. 

“Are  _ you _ going?”

“No, but I never was,” she says briskly. “I’m going to the theatre with my parents tomorrow, they’ve got us tickets to-”

“Right, well, I can’t go by myself.”

“Sure you can.” She nods encouragingly, but I bristle at this, at her intrusion, at her assumption that this is at all her business. “Just go for dinner and that way you can spend time with Ginny without pretending that Ron and I have brought you-”

The irritation that’s been quietly brewing bubbles to the surface. “Give it a rest, Hermione.”

Her eyes go wide. “Excuse me?”

“Quit playing matchmaker with me and Ginny,” I snap, jumping to my feet. “You are the most interfering person I’ve ever met, it drives me mad - I don’t know if you know this, but my relationship with Ginny has nothing to do with you-”

“What relationship?” she cries. “If hadn’t been for me, you’d still be avoiding her completely and lying around here all the time feeling sorry for yourself-”

“You locked us in a scullery against our will.” My voice swells and rises with every word. “Don’t you see how fucked up that is?”

Hurt crosses her face. “I just want you to be happy, Harry - I’m just trying to help-”

“I didn’t ask for your help.”

“Do you want it to be like this forever?” she asks, and the empathy in her voice should probably calm me down, but it only makes my hands shake with pent-up adrenaline. “Because it was like that with me and Ron for a long time, we were just friends but we both knew there was something more-”

“Good for you!” I fire back. “So you’ve got your little happily-ever-after. It doesn’t work out like that for everyone.”

Her mouth forms a tight, angry little line across her face, and then she snaps, “fine. Be miserable forever,” and stomps out of the room.

•••

At some point in the morning, Hermione leaves. Or rather, I assume she does, because I don’t see her at all, but by the time I get out of bed around noon, I am very much alone in the house. It feels weird and cold, like some of the darkness from when the Black family inhabited it has returned without the warmth of Ron and Hermione to drive it away. I eat beans on toast as both a late breakfast and an early lunch, and then spend several hours of the afternoon on the sofa in the drawing room with the wireless broadcasting the first matches of the Quidditch World Cup, where it’s being held this year. While munching on slightly stale crisps, I listen as Peru absolutely demolish the United States, and then as Bulgaria defeat Sweden with a margin of over two hundred points. As I’m laughing to myself about how Ron will cope with this news when he’s back, I remember why he’s gone, and my subsequent row with Hermione, and I suddenly feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach.

Because Hermione,  _ damn her _ , is right. I am doing exactly what she said: lying around this big empty house, wasting my time feeling sorry for myself. Though she’s incredibly, annoyingly interfering, and she has been since we were eleven, it’s all out of love. Where would I even be if she hadn’t figured out that it was a basilisk living in the Chamber, or if her Time-Turner hadn’t allowed us to save Sirius and Buckbeak? Was she interfering then?

And all those little nudges, those steps forward that I’ve taken lately… they’ve been good. I’m quite glad to have my new owl, nameless though he may be, and I might have waited years on it if not for Ron and Hermione’s gentle encouragement. I suppose that I could go on hiding out here forever, pining and wondering about what could have been, coasting along and settling for what I’ve already got. I’ve approached the entire summer with the attitude that I was destined to die in the Forbidden Forest, so I’m lucky just to be alive and everything else is icing on the cake.

But then again... I’m alive. I’ve been given a second chance (a third, if you consider that I was actually supposed to die at fifteen months old). Wizards commonly live to be over a hundred years old, which means I’ve probably got ninety of them left. Shouldn’t I do something with all of that time?

I stand up and brush the crisp crumbs from my t-shirt. I’m that odd, bloated sort of full that comes from slowly ingesting greasy carbs all day, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still room for Mrs. Weasley’s cooking. Heading into the bathroom, I give myself a thorough appraisal. My hair is a wreck, as it usually is, but there’s really nothing I can do about that. Even without crumbs sprinkled over it, this shirt has seen better days, and these jeans have a frayed hem... but better to be there, looking like a disheveled slob, than not be there at all.

So I go out to the front step, ragged jeans and messy hair and all, and turn on the spot.

Dodging gnomes and chickens as I go, I traipse through the garden towards the house. Perhaps I ought to be nervous, but I have the sense that this is exactly where I should be. As I approach the back door, the Weasleys are just sitting down at the table, so I knock to announce my presence, but then turn the knob to enter without waiting for an invitation.

All eyes are immediately on me. It’s a smaller group today - just Ginny, Bill, Fleur, and the parents - but I still feel quite gawked at.

“Sorry,” I say. “Am I too late?”

“Not at all, dear!” Mrs. Weasley sets down a large bowl of roasted parsnips and ushers me over to a chair next to Fleur, right across from Ginny. “You’re always welcome, you know that.”

As she bustles over to the cupboard for another place setting, I look up and find Ginny’s warm, intense gaze upon me. “Didn’t know if I’d see you today.”

Her voice is low and even, betraying no emotion. But I think - I  _ hope _ \- that perhaps my presence is a pleasant surprise.

I meet her eyes with my own. “Neither did I.”

She smiles, then picks up her fork and begins to eat.

•••

“So.” Ron leans back against the wall of the lift and folds his arms over his chest. He’s doing his very best to look stern, but amusement twinkles in his eyes. “I heard there was a bit of a… spat.”

He’s been back from his training mission for maybe eight hours, tops. I hadn’t even realized that he was home at all until I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and heard the telltale thumping of his headboard against the wall, but apparently, at some point during his reunion with Hermione, they managed to have a conversation.

“There may have been,” I reply warily, before relenting. “All right, I didn’t mean to have a go at her like that. I’m going to apologize next time I see her.”

“That’d be good,” he says. “She doesn’t mean to be pushy, she’s just… enthusiastic.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Ron laughs and shakes his head. “I shouldn’t have left you unsupervised. Next time, I’m sending you round Mum and Dad’s.”

“I actually did go over there,” I say as the metal doors to the lift jangle open and we head into the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. “On Sunday. Just for dinner.”

Ron nods with satisfaction, and I am, not for the first time since summer began, struck by the depths of his loyalty to Hermione. Gone is the Ron of sixth year, who used to grumble about revoking my ‘permission’ to date Ginny and turn away when I would kiss her. Hermione, in all her beguiling ways, has drawn him completely over to her side.

I suppose that’s what regular shagging will do to a guy.

“So how was it?” he asks, sidestepping a cart stacked with files as we proceed down the long, winding corridor to the classrooms.

“It was good. I didn’t stay all that long.”

But I’d talked with Ginny about Quidditch, because she was listening to the matches all day too, and we took turns imagining Ron’s reaction if Bulgaria were to win the entire thing this year. Exchanged incredulous glances when Fleur, apropos of nothing, began explaining all the shortcomings of English pastries as opposed to French ones. Cut ourselves massive slices of banoffee pie, then moaned about being uncomfortably stuffed once we finished them. 

It was nice. Really, really nice.

“No, I mean the food,” says Ron, like I should have understood this all along. “I was eating plain chicken out of a tin on Sunday night. Let me live vicariously.” 

I laugh and hitch my rucksack higher up on my shoulder. “The food was good too.”

“What’d Mum make?”

As we round a corner, I open my mouth to answer only to close it again: Kingsley Shacklebolt is striding towards us. It’s not often that we see him, since he’s usually off doing whatever interim Ministers do when they’re trying to piece a society back together following a devastating war. 

“Potter,” he greets me in that deep, sonorous voice of his. “Just the man I’ve been looking for.”

“Oh?” is all I can manage in response. Even though I’ve known him since I was fifteen, when he was an Auror and a member of the Order, he’s infinitely more intimidating now.

“And Weasley,” he says, unfazed by my awkwardness, “I heard you did quite well this weekend. First mission, was it?”

“Yes,” Ron nods, standing a little taller now. “Yes, thank you.”

“You know, as Minister,” Kingsley goes on, his attention back on me, “I’ve been offered my own box at the Quidditch World Cup final this year, but I have too much going on here to have the time to attend. I was hoping you could take the tickets off my hands.”

From the deep pocket of his robes, he extracts four brightly-colored slips of parchment. 

“Really?” I blurt out. “I mean - there’s no one else you want to give them to?” Beside me, Ron stiffens, and I have the sense that he’s trying to send me a telepathic message to shut the hell up. “I mean, not that I don’t appreciate-”

Kingsley chuckles and claps me jovially on the back. “You’ve earned it. It’s being held in Iceland this year, so I’ll have a Portkey arranged for you and your guests.”

“Oh - well - great,” I stammer out as he hands me the tickets. “That’s really - thank you.”

“You’re absolutely welcome.”

He steps past us and continues on his way, and Ron and I turn to stare at each other in disbelief. “We’re going to the World Cup,” he says, a slow grin spreading across his face.

“Yeah.” His excitement is contagious, flooding through me as it starts to sink in. “Yeah, we really are.”

“All right, so,” begins Ron as we start off towards our classroom again. “There’s four tickets, right?”

“Yeah, so I’ve got three spares, haven’t I?” I joke, erupting into laughter when Ron shoves me and I almost trip over a box of evidence. “Reckon Percy’d want to go?”

“Oh, fuck off,” Ron chuckles. “So obviously me, you, and Hermione. Right?”

“Obviously. And then the fourth…” I hazard a glance at him. “Reckon Ginny’d want to go?”

“Nah,” he replies, deadpan. “She’s not that into Quidditch.”

I shoot him a withering look. “I mean because it’s with me.”

“I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but she actually doesn’t hate you anymore.”

“Right, but it’s one thing to hang out at the Burrow together and another to… to invite her to a foreign country for the weekend.”

“But it’s the  _ World Cup final _ , Harry. She’d be mad to turn that down.”

He has a point. Plus, I figure that if Ginny does turn down box seats to the most important Quidditch match of the last four years, I’ll definitely know where I stand with her and can return to my previous life of wallowing in my own patheticness. 

“All right, but…” We reach our classroom, finally, but the door is still locked - we’re always early, which shows what an effect Hermione has truly had on us - and Ron leans against the wall to wait. “Don’t tell her about it. Let me ask her myself, all right?”

Ron runs his hands down his face, suddenly weary. I can’t tell if he’s exhausted from his recent mission or from watching me pine after his sister. “Yeah. All right.”

“You know Bulgaria are in the quarter-finals, don’t you?”

He nods glumly, eyes downcast to his shoes. “Yeah, I know.”

•••

It’s Sunday, again, finally, and we’ve arrived at the Burrow just a bit early. Just enough that I won’t have to do what I want and need to do while sat around the kitchen table with her whole family watching. Since Thursday morning, I’ve been mulling it over, trying to come up with the right words and the right place and the right time, and I’ve made woefully little progress. It turns out that while I’m eighteen and I’ve won a war and destroyed Horcruxes and done all sorts of things that people tell me will be in history books, I’ve only ever asked a girl out once - Cho - and it didn’t go all that swimmingly. I never actually asked Ginny out at all. We kissed, and that was it. We fell right into it, and we didn’t need any of those formalities, because we both just… knew. It’s funny, really, that when you’ve had all of these big accomplishments when you’re young, you’re expected to be able to navigate the normal bits of life, but it doesn’t work that way. I spent so much of my life focusing on survival that now I’m behind on everything else.

In the meantime - because nobody wanted to humor Ron and play yet another round of chess - we’re all sat on the floor of the sitting room, a precarious house of Exploding Snap cards in front of us. Ginny’s lying on her stomach, chin propped up on one hand, a card in the other, as she considers her next move. At any second, the entire thing could blow up in our faces, which feels more than a little apt.

Hermione has on her very best poker face. To her credit, she has managed to dial down her exuberance over my fledgling relationship with Ginny, and I know her well enough to know this means she’s positively bursting on the inside, but at least she’s managing to contain herself. 

“I’m sorry for meddling,” she had said on Thursday evening when we’d reconciled under Ron’s watchful eye. “I just want to see you happy, and you two were such a great couple, and-”

“It’s all right,” I’d said quickly before she could really get going. “I’m sorry I shouted.”

She’d smiled and said thank you, Ron had declared a craving for pizza, we’d argued over who had to go out to pick it up, and that had been that.

Mostly. The gears are quite clearly still turning in her head, which means that she hasn’t given up on it, she’s just concocting up more subtle tactics.

The problem is, she’s about as subtle as a Blast-Ended Skrewt.

“Oh, Ron,” she says, unfolding her legs and getting to her feet. “I think I left something upstairs in your room.”

Carefully balancing two cards against each other atop the house, Ron doesn’t even look up. “All right.”

“Can you help me look?” she asks, brows arched meaningfully at him. “Your room is rather… messy. It could take a while.”

He looks up, and understanding dawns on his face. “Right, of course. Sure.”

As they head up the stairs, Ginny turns to me, perplexed and biting back laughter. “What the…”

“Yeah, I don’t know,” I reply with a shrug. “I don’t ask questions anymore.”

“That’s probably for the best.”

This is the only opportunity I’ll have all day. Even with Ron and Hermione out of the way, there’s really no such thing as privacy at the Burrow, and an interruption could come along at any minute. If it’s now or never… then it’s got to be now.

“Hey, so…” I clear my throat. “Are you busy next weekend?” When her head snaps over to look at me, my stomach drops. Why would I open like that, with a question that sounds like nothing so much as an invitation to some sort of candlelit dinner followed by a romantic stroll along the Thames? Of course she’s going to look at me like I’ve sprouted a second head. “It’s the World Cup final,” I add hastily, “and I’ve got tickets - the Minister’s box-”

I am so,  _ so _ bad at this. It’s a wonder I got the few weeks I had with her last year. 

Her brown eyes go wide. “You’ve got tickets?!”

“Kingsley gave them to me, and, erm - I wanted to know if - I’d really like it if you came along.” The words tumble quickly from my lips. “Ron and Hermione are going too.”

“Oh.” Eagerly, she nods. “Yeah, definitely. That’d be brilliant.”

“Brilliant.” I can’t stop myself beaming at her, but to my absolute delight, she smiles broadly right back. “Er, there’ll be a Portkey and everything, I’ll let you know once that’s arranged. I’ll send a letter over with-” I quirk my head at her, and spots of color appear on her cheeks. “Has my owl got a name yet?”

Her expression turns sheepish. “I’m still thinking about it.”

“If it’s too much responsibility,” I say teasingly, “Ron would be happy to step in-”

“That’s exactly why you can’t let him do it,” she says earnestly. “He isn’t taking it as seriously as he should - honestly, Agamemnon? You can’t let that happen.”

“He also suggested Roger-“

“That’s even worse.”

“All right,” I laugh. “I trust you.”

“Good.”

Naturally, the topic arises over dinner, and the discussion soon turns to logistics. I recall all too well Mrs. Weasley’s panic-stricken face when we returned from the disastrous World Cup before fourth year, so I can’t blame her for wanting to know every single detail now. Perhaps I’ve been too preoccupied by the Quidditch and the anticipation of inviting Ginny, but it’s the first time that I realize: we’ll be staying in tents.

It’s different. It’s obviously very different than living in a tent in the wilderness with no food and no hope and prices on our heads. It’s one night, for Quidditch, and Mrs. Weasley is already talking about sending us with enough snacks to last a week, “just in case the match runs long.” There are no Horcruxes and no dark wizards. Even so, I wasn’t planning on staying in one again anytime soon.

Maybe it’s another thing I need to push through. Another way to firmly declare the war in the past, once and for all. It already ruled our lives for years and it took so much from us. We need to take back as much as we can.

“We’ve still got Bill’s tent,” Ron says thoughtfully, a wedge of roasted potato speared on his fork. “But we, erm… we lost the Perkins’ one.”

I know he’s thinking, like I am, of the exact circumstances under which we lost said tent, and the horrific events that unfolded thereafter.

“Well, you’ll definitely need two,” says Mrs. Weasley briskly in response. “That way you and Harry can stay in one, and Hermione and Ginny can stay in the other.”

“Mmm,” Ron nods his agreement, wiping his face with a napkin to hide the grin threatening to burst forth. “Definitely.”

Beside him, Hermione goes pink, demurely eating a parsnip without a single word. As I’m left to ponder just how deeply entrenched Mrs. Weasley is in her denial, the conversation turns to the odds of Bulgaria making it to the final, and all talk of tents is dropped.


	5. The 423rd Quidditch World Cup

The week races by, each day marked by new developments in the World Cup: Japan defeat Canada, then Italy; Bulgaria are flattened by Peru (and Ron suggests opening up a bottle of prosecco to celebrate). Suddenly another Sunday morning is upon us, and I’m up with the sun, sat in my basement kitchen beside a burnt-out Hoover that’s ready to transport the four of us to Iceland at a moment’s notice. 

“Why’ve we got to be there so early?” asks Ron from the kitchen table, where he’s slumped forward, chin on his folded arms, eyes puffy from lack of sleep. “The match isn’t until tonight.”

“Kingsley arranged it that way,” I remind him. “He reckons that the earlier I get there, the less chance there is of me being… well-”

“Recognized,” says Hermione. She lifts a hand to her mouth to cover a gaping yawn. “It’s not a terrible idea.”

“I’ll let the Minister know you approve.”

As she glares at me, I pick up my coffee cup and drain it into my mouth. I’m considering a refill when the fireplace lights up in a rush of green flames, and there stands Ginny. Rucksack over one shoulder, she looks just as disgruntled by the early hour as the rest of us.

“Whoa,” she says, dusting soot off her jeans as she steps into the kitchen. “I haven’t been here in so long, it’s… different.”

My memory pulls me back to the Christmas of my fifth year: the attack on Mr. Weasley; the overnight vigil we held here with bated breath; Ginny curled up by the fire with the light reflecting in her eyes. It must have been the last time she was here.

“Oh, yeah, I’ve fixed it up,” I say as she surveys the room. “It was a bit…”

“Creepy?”

“Yeah.”

Plainly disinterested in discussing home renovation, Ron hauls himself to his feet with a groan. “Should we get going, then?”

Ginny looks over at me and gives a decisive nod. “Let’s do it.”

After gathering up all of our supplies, including two enormous boxes of food courtesy of Mrs. Weasley, we form a circle around the burnt-out Hoover. With my fingertips hovering inches from its plastic surface, I just hope that this World Cup is better than the last.

Our Portkey deposits us unceremoniously onto cold, hard ground. As I pick myself up, the vertigo subsides and my surroundings come into focus. 

Kingsley said Iceland when he gave us the tickets. For months, all of the World Cup adverts have said Iceland. But where we really are is one of a tiny chain of islands off the south coast of Iceland. The sky above us is iron-grey and a cold, briny wind whips off the North Atlantic Ocean. There’s no shoreline the way there is in Cornwall, no gentle recession of land into water, just jagged cliffs rising hundreds of feet above the waves. In the distance, the Quidditch stadium looms, surrounded by a vast sea of tents.

“So, where to?” asks Ron, his cheeks already pink from cold.

“I’ve got a map,” I recall, and pull the parchment from my back pocket. 

As I try to make sense of it, Ginny peers curiously over my shoulder. She’s so close that I can smell her hair, flowery and tantalizing as ever, and when I steal a glance at her, I can make out every single one of her long, fair eyelashes. Her proximity does nothing for my concentration; I’ve got to retrace a path three times before any of it sticks in my brain. 

This definitely means something, doesn’t it? There’s no logical reason for her to be a welcome intruder in my personal space like this. Maybe, like me, she just wants to be close.

“It looks like our campsite is on the other side of the pitch,” Ginny states, pointing to a small, looping trail on the right side of the map. “Maybe it’s less crowded over there.”

Oh. Perhaps she really was just reading. 

As we set out across the frosty grass, Hermione is practically beside herself with excitement, and not at all because of the Quidditch.

“These islands are mostly uninhabited,” she gushes, gripping Ron’s arm with a gloved hand. “It’s actually a small chain of volcanoes - most of them are under the ocean, but there was a relatively recent eruption here on the main island-”

“Relatively recent?” Ron repeats, rightfully alarmed. “How recent are we talking, exactly?”

“About twenty-five years ago,” says Hermione with a casual wave of her hand. “Anyway, the lava destroyed part of the main village-“

“That’s comforting,” Ron quips. “Thanks for all this. I’ll definitely sleep well tonight.”

“The odds of any eruption happening here today are incredibly low,” Hermione tells him. “Muggles actually monitor these things-“

“Do they? How?”

As they carry on discussing seismic activity, Ginny and I drop back to walk behind them, not interested in embroiling ourselves in the discussion. We don’t converse, but it isn’t a tense silence like it might have been a few weeks ago. I’ve never been good at lulls in conversation - that’s one of the reasons Ron and Hermione are so good to have around, neither of them knows how to shut up - but I don’t feel the usual desperate need to fill this one. It’s nice just to exist with her. 

We’re in one of the very last campsites, situated just metres from the edge of a cliff. Ron drops his bags and conjures up a fire while Hermione pulls both tents out of her beaded bag and tasks herself with assembling them. Unlike the last World Cup, where the campgrounds were managed by Muggles and therefore use of magic was discouraged, this particular part of the island is occupied only by witches and wizards. The tents stand upright with just a few waves of Hermione’s wand, and Ron casts a Shield charm around our area to keep the wind from extinguishing the fire. It feels like déjà vu, watching him walk around a tent casting a protective spell, but this one isn’t a matter of life and death. We’re safe here, and it isn’t the flimsy sort of safety we had last year, where one toe out of line could and would put our lives in grave danger. My biggest concern is what will happen once people catch wind that I’m here.

Until, of course, Ron stows his and Hermione’s overnight bags away into one of the tents, and my stomach plummets.

“We need water,” I decide at once, patting my pocket to double-check for my wand. “Ron, come help me.”

“Er…” Ron looks up from where he’s now kneeling by the fire, digging through a crate of food. “I was going to make breakfast-”

“We’ll need water for that.”

“I’m not boiling anything,” he replies, puzzled. “Actually, I think I figured out a way to make bacon over the fire-”

“We’re going to need it eventually.” I pin him with what I hope is a subtly coercive stare. “Just come with me.”

He must get the message, because he rises to his feet and brushes his hands off against his jeans. “Yeah, all right. Have we got a pail?”

I hadn’t considered this - I’m not actually fussed about the water at all, as the tents have sinks and we have wands to conjure it ourselves - and I’m just hoping that we’re on our way before the girls cotton on to this - but we do locate a pail in one of the tents. Ron kisses Hermione goodbye, and we set out across the campgrounds. 

“So I know what you told your mum,” I say as soon as we’re out of earshot of the girls, “but what are the  _ actual  _ sleeping arrangements?” 

Ron shrugs. “Me and Hermione, and you and-” It clicks into place. “Oh.  _ Oh. _ ”

“Yeah,” I say curtly. “Oh.”

“So just stay with me and Hermione, then,” he says as we wind around a tent draped with a massive Peruvian flag. “It’ll be just like old times.”

“I can’t do that,” I say. “I don’t want to interfere.”

Ron laughs and ducks his head to avoid being hit by a young boy flying through the air on a broom. “You always interfere.”

“I do not,” I reply, more indignantly than intended, which only makes him laugh harder. “Plus, if I stay with you and Hermione, then Ginny’ll think I don’t want to stay with her-“

“But you do.” 

“Yeah,” I admit. “But I mean, that’s a bit forward, isn’t it? ‘Come and share a tent with me?’”

“They’re like little houses, these tents,” he says. “It’s not like it comes across as an invitation to shag-” He grimaces and shakes his head, like a dog clearing water from its ears. “But all right, then, how about I share with Ginny?”

“You want me to stay with Hermione?” I ask, lowering my voice so I’m not overheard as we step into the queue for the water pump. Our plan for an early arrival may have helped initially, but the excitement of the impending match has everyone out of their tents already.

“Sure,” Ron says with a little chuckle. “I’m pretty sure you’re not going to try it on with her or anything.”

“I just feel bad, ‘cause it’s your last weekend before she leaves, and I know you probably want to… you know. Be together.”

“Yeah,” he concedes. “I mean, it would be cool to add Iceland to the list of countries we’ve done it in-”

I let out a startled sputter of laughter. “You’ve been keeping a list?!”

“It’s not that much of a list, just Australia and England so far,” he says, cheeks reddening. “But it’s all right. I should probably get used to being apart, shouldn’t I?” 

“But that’s what I’m saying, take the opportunity while you’ve got it-”

“Or,” he interrupts, struck by inspiration, “you and I can stay together and the girls can share, and my mum can rest easy.”

It’s this swift generosity, this selflessness, the utter  _ Ron- _ ness of this suggestion that makes me feel even guiltier. I don’t know how it’s even possible to be the sort of friend he has been to me all these years, and what’s more is that he doesn’t think it’s anything remarkable. He never thinks he’s doing more than he should.

“Know what, it’s fine,” I decide as the queue shuffles forward. “Just stay with Hermione. Worse comes to worse, I’ll sleep outside.”

It all just feels very intimate, the idea of sharing a tent, even if we’re on opposite sides of the room. It shows you all these little pieces of someone that you’d never ordinarily see: waking in the morning, drowsy and soft with sleep, and the sound of each other’s breathing as you drift off. It’s not that I don’t want these things, but they seem like skipping a lot of steps we’ve still yet to take.

We fill up our pail at the water pump, along with a few canteens, and make our way back to our campsite. In our absence, Ginny and Hermione have unpacked our sizable bounty of food, the latter sorting through it, the former engrossed in a special World Cup edition of  _ Quidditch Quarterly. _ I leave Ron and Hermione to breakfast preparations and drop down beside Ginny on the grass. The thought rolls through my mind that a month ago, I’d never have approached her like this.

“So who’s your money on?” I ask, my stomach flipping when she looks up at me and smiles.

“Japan, I think,” she replies, thoughtful. “Because look.” She sets the magazine down on the ground in front of us, her finger pressed against a page comparing the Seekers from each team. “Look at Watanabe’s average capture time, it’s two  _ hours _ faster than Bedoya.”

Her long hair slips over one shoulder as she leans forward to read, hanging in a glossy curtain between us. I have to sit on my hand to resist the urge to tuck it behind her ear. More and more lately, it’s starting to feel like the tension that exists between us has had a change in its nature. It’s not awkwardness or resentment the way it was a month or two ago. It feels like magnetism, growing stronger the longer we resist it.

“Peru’s got a better Keeper though,” Ron pipes up from the opposite side of the fire, where he’s wrapping strips of bacon around a skewer. 

“As if you know anything about proper Keeping,” Ginny shoots back, her grin broadening when Ron holds up two fingers in response.

“My two Quidditch Cups say differently - and how many have  _ you _ won, exactly?”

Ginny cocks her head, squinting at him. “Also two?” she reminds him, incredulous. “The same exact ones you’ve won?”

Our eyes lock, and as we burst into laughter together, her head tilts just the slightest bit towards mine. And I find myself leaning toward her too, I almost can’t help it - and even if I could, I don’t think I want to. I want these little moments with her. I want as many of them as I can get.

“Oh, fine,” Ron snaps back, though he’s laughing a bit too. “Neither of you are getting breakfast now.”

•••

The bacon actually turns out nice, if maybe a little charred and crispy, and following breakfast, we spend the morning in casual discussion of the odds for the upcoming match (Hermione contents herself with a book). For lunch, Ron attempts to make cheese toasties in the same fashion - speared onto skewers, held over the flame - but when the cheese instantly melts and falls in greasy globs into the kindling, he gives up and we eat them cold as we watch the waves. This minor setback doesn’t stop him from attempting to roast the rest of the food, however, and by the time the afternoon rolls around, we’ve stuffed our bellies full with all of his experiments (marshmallows, chocolate biscuits, and crisps, just to name a few) and can hardly move. Despite the cold, none of us even considers seeking refuge inside one of the tents. Instead, we bury ourselves under massive hand-knitted blankets, courtesy of the Weasleys, and relish what little sun peeks through the clouds to warm us.

The day feels damn near perfect. One of those that drives out any worries or fears, any concern for the future or remembrance of the difficulties of the past, and you’re content just to exist in the moment. A year ago, if someone had told me that I’d be sat around a campfire at the World Cup once more, the war won, with the people I care about most beside me, I’d have checked that individual into St. Mungo’s for a mental evaluation. But we’re here, safe and alive, our lives stretching out endlessly before us. More and more lately, I’m starting to wonder if that future of which I’ve dreamed will come to light after all.

It’s so good that I don’t want to disturb it, I don’t want it to end. I’m almost disappointed when the evening rolls around and it’s time to make our way to the stadium. 

“Should we really leave the fire lit?” asks Hermione worriedly as we gather our things. “What if it spreads and burns down the tents?”

“The tents are fire-proof,” Ron replies, a maroon wool blanket slung over his shoulder. “Mum and Dad made sure of that after… you know. The last World Cup.”

“I still don’t think we should leave it unattended. It’s so windy here, and I know we’ve put charms up, but-”

“But then it’ll be freezing by the time we get back-”

“Oh, I’m sorry, are we only allowed to light one fire per day?”

Ginny leans in close to me, and I get a noseful of her flowery-scented hair once again. “Let’s just leave them,” she mutters. “Let them fight it out all night.”

I bite my lip to hold back laughter. “Not a bad idea,” I reply in the same furtive tone. 

Not that we’d ever actually abandon them, but I let myself imagine it: the match playing out before us, and Ginny and I alone in the Minister’s box, snuggled together under a blanket to combat the cold. Is that what she’s picturing too?

“We’re leaving,” Ginny declares, voice raised to be heard over the incessant bickering. “When you’ve decided what to do about the fire, you can join us.”

Her hand closes around my wrist, and even through her glove and my jacket, the warmth permeates right on down to my skin. Happily, I let myself be dragged out of the bounds of our campsite. As Ginny surely expected, the fire is extinguished just seconds later by a jet of water from Hermione’s wand, and she and Ron fall into step beside us.

“So Hermione won that one, huh?” remarks Ginny as we make our way down the dirt patch to the pitch.

“I still think it would have been fine,” says Ron stubbornly. “But Harry’s got the tickets, we had no choice.”

“Just because you’re not concerned with fire safety, Ron,” Hermione begins, still haughty and annoyed, “doesn’t mean the rest of us are oblivious…”

As the argument resumes, Ginny and I stride ahead of them. We’re not alone on the path, not even close: hundreds of other match attendees have had the same idea as us, and it’s loud and busy, and the collective excitement is so palpable that the air is practically buzzing. I’ve never liked crowds, but it’s easy to ignore this one when I have Ginny beside me. Everything else feels inconsequential when I’m with her.

Unlike last time, England isn’t the host country, so the box granted to its leadership (and, via Kingsley, to us) is significantly smaller than the one we sat in years ago, and only has seats to accommodate the four of us. Ginny leans her forearms on the railing once we’re closed inside, taking in the pitch, the seemingly-infinite stands that rise up all around us, the enormous blackboard flashing advertisements for Sugarplum’s Sweetshop and Twilfit and Tattings. 

“One day,” she says, looking up at me, cheeks pink, “I’m going to play here. Not  _ here  _ here, obviously,” she clarifies. “Not Iceland, unless they host again. But… the World Cup. One day, I’ll be out there.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I say with utmost honesty.

“Have you ever thought about it? Playing professionally?”

I scrub my fingers through my hair, which, thanks to the weather, is more ridiculous than ever. “Maybe a bit. Last time we were here, I thought about what it’d be like, but I don’t know if I was ever that good.”

“You were good, though. I mean, you weren’t the youngest Seeker in a century for no reason.”

“They were desperate,” I say with a shrug. “Plus, I think I missed more matches than I ever actually played in at school, what with Umbridge and detention and everything like that.”

“You’d rather be an Auror anyway, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah,” I say after a moment’s consideration. “Yeah, I would.” 

Until I spoke the words aloud, I hadn’t realized how true they really are. I can’t imagine that I’ll ever not want to be on the frontlines, in the thick of the action, in the heart of the fight. If my mission earlier this month taught me anything, it’s that I’ve found the thing I’m meant to do.

“You, though,” I add. “You’re brilliant. You should definitely go for it.”

She clasps her hands together in front of her. “I intend to.”

If there are cameras here - and I’m certain there are, even if I haven’t detected them yet - I’m sure they’ll capture me gazing at her like a lovesick fool. It must be written all over my face, but I don’t know how to stuff it down and pretend it’s not there anymore. I don’t know how to hide it or mask it. I am lost to her, and happily so.

Straightening up, she wraps her arms around herself, one leg bouncing rapidly. “Are you cold?” I ask immediately.

“Nah,” she says with a little shake of her head. “Maybe a little bit, but it’s fine.”

“Oh, come on, of course you are. It’s freezing out here.” 

I grab one of the blankets off the seats behind us, this one crafted from deep blue wool, and before I can think too much about it, or talk myself out of it, I’m draping it over her shoulders. 

“All right, well…” Ginny grabs one corner of the blanket with the hand nearest to me and holds it up, sort of like a cape. “It’s big enough for both of us, isn’t it?”

I could protest. I could insist that I’m fine (I’ve endured worse, to be sure). A month ago, I might have done just that. I’d have let the uncertainty creep in and control me, and then later resigned myself to wondering what could have been. 

But instead of all that, I duck down so that my shoulders align with hers, and she tosses the blanket over my back. We’re so close now that our upper arms press tightly together, and I have no intention of ever moving.

“Better?” Her voice has gone low, almost raspy, but somehow it’s not difficult to hear her over the cacophony of the crowds.

“Much better.”

•••

“I mean, Peru would’ve won,” Ron says, fitting a potato wedge onto a skewer. “Japan just caught the Snitch first, that’s all.”

From beside me, Ginny bursts out into astonished laughter. “Yeah, because that’s how the sport works. You can’t just say ‘well, my side would’ve won if the other team hadn’t’.”

Shaking her head in amusement, she picks up her bottle of butterbeer and takes a long sip.

It’s past midnight. The match was long, brutal, bloody at times, and our voices have all gone hoarse from shouting. Not yet ready for sleep, we’d relit the campfire upon our return to the tents, and then Ron had insisted on cooking up a late-night snack for everyone. 

Somewhere, deep in my bones, I must actually be exhausted, but it’s drowned out by the buzz and excitement of the match, of Ginny close beside me, of the unending crash of the ocean nearby and the murky blue sky above. 

“I’m just saying, it wasn’t a blowout or anything,” Ron replies, though he’s laughing a bit now too. “Up by a hundred and forty’s a pretty decent lead.”

“Yeah, until the other side catches the Snitch.”

“Ahh, well,” he shrugs, slowly rotating the skewer so all sides of the potato wedge are touched by the flame. “At least it wasn’t Bulgaria, right?”

He looks over at Hermione with a cheeky grin, but she just smiles back, then inches closer so she can rest her head on his shoulder.

“So you’re trying to make chips... over the fire?” I ask as the skin of the potato quickly blackens.

“I’m not trying, mate,” replies Ron with false bravado. “I’m pretty sure I’m succeeding.”

“Isn’t the whole thing about chips that they’re deep-fried, though?” I go on, well aware of Ginny fighting back laughter beside me. “I think you’re just roasting them.”

“Then they’re roasted chips,” Ron decides. “They’ll still be good - oh, fuck-” He pulls the potato out of the fire and blows out the little burgeoning flame that’s ignited on its tip, then discards it onto a plate. “We’ll just call that one a tester.”

Ginny rises and heads into one of the tents, and when she returns a moment later, it’s with a massive sack of sweets clenched in one first. “I just think this’ll be easier.”

As she drops back down beside me, I throw the corner of the blanket over her lap so that it covers us both, and she tosses me a grateful smile.

“Brilliant,” Ron agrees, tossing the skewer down onto the ground and reaching out a long arm for a licorice wand.

Steadily, we work through this treasure trove of sugar. Ginny and I share a box of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans, tossing the questionable ones directly into the fire, and Ron has to grab a Peppermint Toad out of the air before it leaps to its own demise, and Hermione even indulges in an entire pack of wine gums without once mentioning the havoc they’ll wreak on her dental health.

“I can’t believe we leave for school tomorrow,” says Ginny, carefully inspecting a dark purple jelly bean. “It’s the thirty-first of August now, isn’t it?”

“Oh, don’t mention it,” says Hermione with a glance up at Ron, who’s very carefully stoic as he rotates a skewer - this one bearing a marshmallow - over the flame. 

“So you’re not excited?”

“I’m looking forward to being Head Girl,” says Hermione, which makes Ron crack a smile, “but I’ve been away for an entire year. I’m probably going to be so behind.”

“I don’t think so, actually.” Ginny takes a tentative nibble of her jelly bean, then cringes. “Oh, it’s aubergine! I thought it might be grape - that’s disgusting.” She lobs it into the fire, then turns her attention back to Hermione. “You might actually be ahead of the rest of us.”

“Well, I’ve been trying to brush up on some of it this summer, but there’s so much to do-”

“I don’t mean it like that,” Ginny interrupts, shaking her head. “It’s just that there wasn’t a whole lot of actual learning going on last year.”

That old familiar sensation of guilt settles itself firmly in my stomach. Ginny went through her own form of hell last year… and I wasn’t there.

“It’ll be different this year,” says Hermione, quiet determination in her voice. “It’ll have to be.”

“And it’ll go by quickly, right?” Ginny adds with a bit more optimism. 

“God, I hope so,” interjects Ron. “At least Christmas isn’t that far off. Four months won’t be too bad, will it?”

He doesn’t sound terribly convinced, even as Hermione plants a kiss on the corner of his mouth. “It’ll be over before we know it,” she tells him.

As he turns to kiss her properly, Ginny sets about digging through the box of jelly beans and comes up with one that’s a strange shade of pale green.

“Mint, maybe?” she says, holding it up so I can see.

“I don’t know,” I respond. “Try it.”

She pops it in her mouth and chews, eyebrows quirking in consideration. “I think it’s pea soup,” she says, letting out a laugh. “I don’t actually mind it. Is that weird?”

“Yes,” I tell her honestly, and she laughs even harder as she seeks out another jelly bean. 

She makes everything more fun. She makes everything brighter, everything warmer. It’s like there’s been something missing inside me, all these little cracks that I’ve been able to live with, not knowing how much more complete I would be once they were filled. 

From across the fire, Ron lets out a long, exaggerated yawn and stretches his arms up over his head, then drops one down to hook it around Hermione’s shoulders. “I think it’s bedtime,” he says, eyeing Hermione inquisitively. “What do you say?”

“Definitely.” She nods, gathering the blanket they’ve been sharing into their arms, and gets to her feet.

The moment’s upon us now; we can postpone the decision on sleeping arrangements no longer. I still don’t want to impose on Ron and Hermione, or force them apart for one of their last nights together. I also don’t want to give the impression that I’m trying to catapult whatever it is I have with Ginny to a place we’re not ready to go. Sharing a blanket is one thing. Sharing a tent, alone, is quite another.

“Goodnight, you two,” says Hermione with a faint smile. Taking Ron by the hand, she starts walking towards one of the tents.

“Wait, Hermione,” Ginny calls to her. “I thought you and I would share tonight.”

Undetectable to anyone but me, the very corners of her mouth twitch.

“Oh.” Hermione’s jaw opens and shuts soundlessly for a moment. “We will, I just, erm - I left something in this one.”

“Right, of course. That makes sense.”

Even in the low, wavering light of the fire, Hermione’s face visibly reddens, and then she carries on tugging Ron into the tent with her.

“You’re horrible,” I tell Ginny, though my cheeks are starting to ache from smiling so much.

“It’s just fun to make her squirm.” Ginny reaches into the sack and pulls out a Chocolate Frog, her fingernails picking at the acetate wrapping. “It doesn’t matter anyway, I’m not tired at all yet.”

“Neither am I.” I figure that I may as well just say it. It’s going to come up at some point, and maybe I can smooth out any stickiness before it even arises. “If you want, y’know, you can have the other tent to yourself. I’ll just share with them.”

“Oh, I would never subject you to that,” she says, her nose crinkling as she smiles. “I wonder if we should even bother with sleeping. The Portkey leaves pretty soon, too, doesn’t it?”

It could come across as a very carefully crafted response, designed to subtly avoid addressing the topic at all. But with Ginny, I know it’s not. More likely, she just hasn’t overthought the implications of sharing a tent the way I have. Or maybe - and I’m scared to even let myself think it - she would actually like to share.

“Around seven, yeah. Ron and I have got training tomorrow,” I recall suddenly. “I’m not sure he even remembers that.”

Ginny peels a strip of acetate away from the cardboard Chocolate Frog box and starts to unwrap it. “Do you like it?”

“What, training?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, I actually do.” The words come out stronger than I intended. “It’s still a lot of school, but it feels more - I mean, you’ve got classes that feel pretty pointless, right?”

Ginny fixes me with a withering glare. “You mean like Arithmancy?”

Startled laughter erupts out of me. As vividly as if it’s just happened, I recall a morning in the spring of my sixth year in which I’d attempted to help her revise for her OWL, even though it was a class I’d never taken, for the sole purpose of spending just a little more time with her. “Right! You did hate Arithmancy.”

“Just be glad you never took it,” Ginny says, her tone grave and serious. “It’s what I get for listening to Hermione.”

“And I told you, never trust what Hermione thinks is fun.”

That morning, golden with warmth and sunlight in the recesses of my memory, had ended with us giving up on Arithmancy entirely and snogging instead. She’s got to be thinking about it like I am. Whatever she feels for me now, there’s no denying the unbridled happiness we’d felt back then, and she can’t have just forgotten it.

“Auror training’s the opposite of that,” I tell her. “It all feels like we’re actually working towards something, so it’s not as bad having exams and things like that.”

Ginny nods. “When are you fully qualified, then?”

“We have a final exam to take in December, and as long as we pass…”

“Then that’s when the real danger starts.”

“No worse than your chosen profession,” I point out. “People took Bludgers to the face tonight.”

She only manages the faintest smile. “Bludgers and dark wizards are a bit different, aren’t they?”

“It’s not the same as it was, though,” I say, watching her pry open the cardboard box, one finger pressed to the top of the Chocolate Frog to keep it from leaping out. “Not since… you know. You don’t need to be worried about Ron-”

“I’m not worried about Ron - oh, bloody hell,” she says suddenly, holding a wriggling Chocolate Frog in one hand and the cardboard box in the other. “Look who’s on the card.”

I take it from her outstretched hand, expecting to see someone like Viktor Krum or Gilderoy Lockhart, but instead I just see my own scarred, bespectacled face blinking back at me.

“Oh, God,” I groan, “let’s just chuck this in the fire-“

I go to do just that, but Ginny grabs my hand to stop me. “Don’t do that! It could be worth something someday!”

“ _ Really _ doubt that-“

“Let’s just see what it says.” Ginny squares up her shoulders like she’s about to make some sort of grand declaration. “‘Harry James Potter’,” she reads. “‘Born thirty-first July, nineteen-eighty’.”

“Accurate so far.”

I scoot closer to her so that I can make out the small text beneath my photo.

_ Best known as the only wizard in recorded history to survive the Killing Curse and for his defeat of Dark wizard Lord Voldemort, Potter is currently in training to become an Auror with the British Ministry of Magic. A talented Seeker, Potter led Gryffindor to Quidditch Cup victory for three of his six years on the Hogwarts team. _

“I - no, I didn’t,” I blurt out. “‘Led Gryffindor to victory’? I didn’t even play in two of them!” I nudge lightly Ginny in the side. “If anyone led the team to victory, it was you.”

“Guess they don’t fact-check,” she replies, eyes still fixed on the card. 

“You’d think they’d at least ask before they put you on a card.”

“Yeah,” says Ginny, setting the card down on the ground next to her, “but if they did that, then you could tell them no, couldn’t you?” 

“Guess so.”

I’m not unaccustomed to being written about, or having my photo in places I didn’t realize it would be, so it is absurd that a Chocolate Frog should set me on edge the way it has. But somehow, it’s placed me on the same level as Albus Dumbledore or Merlin or Agrippa, and I cannot justify it. I didn’t set out for fame or glory; I just did what I had to do.

“For the record, I’d have told them no. I wouldn’t - I don’t like this sort of thing.”

“I know that.”

“There’s going to be pictures of us tomorrow in the paper,” I go on. It is imperative to me that she understands this. “Anytime I do anything or go anywhere, it ends up as news. I wish it wouldn’t, but-“

“I know,” Ginny repeats, more firmly this time. “I know you haven’t asked for any of it.”

The Chocolate Frog has stopped struggling, so she snaps the leg off and offers it to me. I take it, and silence falls between us. 

“Does it bother you?” I ask after a moment’s quiet chewing. “That being around me means you’ll be - well-“

“Judged and stared at?” 

“Basically.”

“If it did, I wouldn’t be here.” Her bottom lip between her teeth, she looks briefly up at the oddly light sky, then her eyes return to me. “Come to that, I wouldn’t have invited you out for my birthday either.”

It’s just us out here. Ron and Hermione in their tent may as well be back in England, because it’s Iike Ginny and I have carved out our own little corner of the world, right here on this cliff. And maybe it’s the cold, or the low, wavering light of the fire, or the utter lack of sleep that erodes the last shred of my filter. Or maybe it’s because I know, despite everything that’s happened, that Ginny well and truly understands me. She will understand why I need to ask what I do.

“Why did you?” 

There’s always the chance that, in all her brutal honesty that I so admire, she’ll tell me that it was out of pity, or out of deference to Ron and Hermione. There’s definitely the chance that, with this one question, I’m taking this surreal, near-perfect night and smashing it into a thousand pieces.

But at least I’ll know.

“Don’t get me wrong,” I add before she has a chance to even open her mouth. “It’s not like I didn’t want to be there. It just… I don’t know. It really seemed like you hated me for a while there.”

She shakes her head, eyes aimed at the dirt surrounding the fire. “I never hated you. I… I could never hate you. I was just angry.”

“But you’re not anymore.”

“Well, it’s like I said. I wouldn’t be here if I was.”

Ginny bites the head off her Chocolate Frog and chews. She doesn’t seem upset or tense or even a little bit wary, just contemplative. I realize then that she wants me to take the lead. She’s open to wherever this thing is going, she just wants me to take us there.

“So what changed?” I ask. “Because one day you were ready to bust down a door to get away from me, and the next you were - well, I mean, you don’t just offer to name someone’s new owl for no reason.”

“I don’t know,” she replies, thoughtful. There is warmth, softness written on her face as she speaks. “Nothing huge, really. Not that I liked being trapped or anything, but it helped that we had to actually talk to each other and I couldn’t avoid it any longer.”

“Don’t worry,” I grin, “I won’t tell Hermione.”

She gives a genuine smile. “You’d better not.”

We fall quiet for what feels like a very, very long time, with only the crashing of the waves and the crackling of the fire to break the silence. It doesn’t feel comfortable like it did earlier. There’s tension again, all of the unspoken things between us humming right below the surface. I don’t know how I can tell, exactly, but I can just sense that she’s about to speak, and all I need to do is wait. 

I’m not used to inaction. Maybe that’s why this past summer has been so uncomfortable for me, because I’ve never been one to sit back and wait. I’ve been frozen in a way. My future was cracked wide open, and I wasn’t sure where to go or how to get there. And I am not a patient person, but for Ginny, I can wait forever. I can do whatever she needs, and right now, she just needs me to wait until she’s ready.

When a gust of wind breaks through the charms around our campsite, Ginny shudders and pulls our shared blanket up a little further around her torso, folding her arms to keep it in place. She has every excuse in the world to escape to the comfort of the tent and leave me to my own devices. But clearly, she isn’t ready for the night to end either.

“It was just a lot,” she says eventually, staring into the very base of the fire, the part where it burns blue and white. “After everything, you know? My whole family was falling apart - Ron just up and left for Australia and that didn’t exactly help - and you were back and nothing was the same as it used to be.”

“And then I left again,” I realize aloud, guilt intensifying. “Right when you and your family were going through all of that, I fucked off to live at Grimmauld Place.”

“Yeah, but I wanted you to,” she says, now looking me in the eye, with not one iota of shame and remorse. I’ve always admired this about her, this boldness, this unwillingness to apologize. “I used to think…” She shakes her head and starts again. “One of the things I always liked best about you was that I understood you. I never had to try to figure you out, you just made sense to me. But then you were gone for a whole year, and when you came back, I didn’t know where you’d been or what you’d been doing, and so much had happened that I just felt like I didn’t know you at all anymore.”

“I wanted to tell you,” I say, my voice sticking in my throat. “Before we left, but I mean, honestly, I didn’t even know where I was going at the time. I barely had a plan to tell you about.”

Her eyebrows slide up her forehead. “Yeah, so I’ve heard.”

“Sometimes I don’t know what I was thinking.” I never planned on voicing this, but now’s as good a time as any. “Splitting up with you, I mean. I was just trying to protect you, that was all I wanted to do, but it’s not like they wouldn’t still have gone after you.”

“I understood why you’d done it, though, and… well, you still would have left, right?”

“Didn’t have much of a choice.”

“Right, so I think…” Her fingers fiddle with a loose thread on her blanket. “It probably would have been harder that way. If we hadn’t split up.”

“It was hard no matter what.”

It occurs to me that I’ve had almost no practice with heart-to-heart conversations like this one. Navigating relationships isn’t something I’m terribly good at, but right now, I know I can say anything to her. 

“I used to… you know that map I’ve got? Of Hogwarts?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“I used to watch you on it last year. I’d find you, wherever you were - Charms class or the common room or wherever - and it’s not like I thought you were having loads of fun with the Carrows running things, but…” I swallow, deeply aware of her eyes on me but unwilling to meet them. I’m not sure what I’ll see if I do: distaste, or pity, perhaps. “It was the most of you I could have, I guess.”

Ginny’s voice comes out small and hoarse. “I didn’t know you did that.”

“I’ve never told anyone about it. Mostly because it’s probably a bit creepy-”

“No, it isn’t.”

I do lift my eyes to meet hers, then, and as always, I’m struck by the intensity of her gaze. 

“It’d have been nice to have one of them for you last year,” she goes on, “but I suppose it would have had to be a map of all of Britain. Wouldn’t really have worked.”

“You’d have wanted to know?”

“Yeah, of course I did. I…” Spots of pink bloom on her cheeks. “I thought about you every single day. And that’s why it helped, you know, our talk in the scullery, because I felt like… like I wasn’t missing that huge piece of your life anymore.”

“But I…” It dawns on me, clear as the sky above us, and I hate myself for not realizing it four months ago. “I’m missing that piece of yours.”

This whole summer, there’s been a chasm between us. At times it has seemed so wide and so deep that I could hardly see her on the other side. I’ve spent this whole time trying to build a bridge across it, hoping that I was saying and doing the right things and scared to make any misstep lest I destroy my progress. I hadn’t once considered why it was there in the first place. I hadn’t once considered that she might want me to close it.

“I know Neville told you about it,” she replies, combing her fingers through her hair to keep the wind from whipping it into her face. “It just seemed like maybe… that was enough for you.”

“That’s Neville. It’s not you. Look, I…” Whereas before, I could barely bring myself to look at her, now it’s hard to tear my eyes away. “You don’t owe me a thing. I just don’t want you to think that I don’t want to know or that I don’t think it’s important. I just thought, you know,  _ I’m  _ the one who chucked you,  _ I’m  _ the one who left, I just didn’t think I had any right to know anything about you anymore. I reckoned if you wanted me to know, you’d have just told me.”

“But to me, it seemed like you just wanted to skip past it or ignore it completely.”

“I know. I did it all wrong, and… and I’m sorry.”

It’s the first time I’ve said those words to her since the end of the war. Turns out they’ve been lodged in my chest since May, and speaking them loosens a tightness I’ve long assumed will always be there. The words tumble out of my mouth of their own volition.

“I’m sorry about all of it. I’m sorry I came back and thought we could pick right back up where we left off, and I’m sorry about everything that’s happened to you because of me. I’m just... I’m not an easy person to have in your life, and I get that, so-“

“I know,” she replies, calm and sure. “I want you in it anyway.”

I nod, trying to tamp down the uncontrollable swelling in my chest, because maybe she just means as friends. Maybe she knows that I’ll always be in Ron’s life and therefore, in hers. Maybe she knows that we can’t pick up where we left off, because those people are gone now… but maybe she wants to start anew.

Silence falls again. Ginny hitches her blanket further up her body, draping it over her shoulders so that she’s just a head poking out above an expanse of blue wool. 

“If you’re cold, you can go inside,” I tell her after a shiver rushes over her. “I won’t be offended.”

She considers this for a moment, lips pursed. “Yeah, I might do, actually,” she says. As she pushes the blanket off her lap and stands, cool air rushes in to mark her absence. “Aren’t you coming?”

Like a complete fool, all I do is blink at her. “Erm - I - I’m fine-“

“Oh, Harry, don’t be like that,” she says impatiently. “What are you going to do, sleep out here in the cold?”

Actually, sleep isn’t part of my plan at all. On the contrary, I anticipate sitting here by the dying fire and playing over every second of the day in my mind until it’s time to leave, but I opt not to mention this to her.

“I said you could have the tent to yourself, it’s all right.” I tilt my head toward the other, occupied tent. “Ron and Hermione must be asleep by now, right?”

Ginny curls her lip in distaste. “Best not to risk it.”

Oh. Oh, she  _ wants _ me there. She’s not just deigning to allow me in her presence, she actually wants me around. And far be it for me to deny her anything that she wants, so I rise as well, extinguish the fire with a wave of my wand, and follow Ginny into the tent.

Each magical tent I’ve been in has been set up a bit differently from the next. The Perkins’ tent, a casualty of the war, had three rooms just like a little flat, but contained enough bunk beds to comfortably sleep eight people. The one that I used on my training mission was almost like a youth hostel, with rows of bunk beds and a large communal kitchen. And this one must be the smaller tent that Hermione and Ginny shared at the last World Cup, because its accommodations are quite meager. There’s a door on one side that I assume leads to a bathroom, and in the main room, there’s just a small armchair, an end table… and a double bed.

If Ginny is at all fazed by this - if her heart has begun thumping wildly in her chest the way mine is doing - she does not let on. Instead, she picks up her rucksack and rifles casually through it. “I’m going to change,” she states as she pulls out a small stack of clothing. “Be right back.”

I watch as she disappears through that small side door, and then snap into action. I already know she’ll tease me if I try to act like I intend to sleep in my jeans, so suddenly - with the knowledge that any moment, Ginny might emerge and find me standing here in my pants - I’m shucking off my jeans and tugging on a pair of sleep trousers. Just as I’m peeling off my jumper, since I can sleep in my undershirt, she reappears in front of me in a long-sleeved thermal shirt and thick fleece trousers. Ever confident, she approaches me with a faint pink flush on the high points of her cheeks.

“Before you say anything stupid and noble about how you’ll sleep on the floor, or - or in the bathtub, or something-”

“There’s a bathtub in here?”

“You don’t have to,” she says. “We can just share the bed. If you want to, I mean,” she adds quickly. “We can share.”

She knows me well, because my instinct  _ is _ to be noble. I want to tell her that it’s fine, that I’m used to it - that I used to sleep in a cupboard, for Merlin’s sake, so I can handle a night on the floor of a tent - and that the bed isn’t that big, so she should have it all to herself. That I am used to going without. 

But what if I drop all that? What if I don’t have to be noble anymore? What if I can actually have what I want, for once in my short, strange life? For so long, I’ve had to sacrifice everything, and it’s hard to envision anything other way.

Still, I meet her gaze with my own, and I nod, and let myself smile, and I say, “okay.”

She steps past me to the bed, walking around to the far side of it and pulling back the corner of the duvet. It’s old and threadbare, with some garish flowered pattern that Aunt Petunia would have adored, and the sheets rustle as she slips into them. I follow suit, slowly, hoping she doesn’t notice the slight trembling of my hands, hoping she can’t tell that my heart is lodged in my throat.

I used to fantasize about this sort of thing - actually, if I’m honest, I never stopped. For all the time that we spent last year, pressed together in back corridors or against dewy grass, we never shared a bed once. Everything was so new, it would have been too soon, and I imagine that had it happened, it would have made it damn near impossible to leave her. But I’ve thought about it, almost non-stop for the past two years, and now it’s here. And as much as adrenaline is gushing through my veins at the closeness, at the soft intimacy of it, it also feels right. It’s another piece that I didn’t know was missing, falling right into place.

Ginny turns over on her side to face me, and I do the same. It’s just the two of us, lying there in the darkness, our noses mere inches apart. A few small windows in the canvas of the tent allow the moon to shine in on us, just enough to make out her features. Her tongue darts out to wet her lips, and I think about doing it: just leaning in and kissing her. It wouldn’t take much. But she’s on the verge of something, I can feel it, and if I interrupt her now - even though every bone in my body is screaming at me to do it - I don’t know if we’ll ever get it back.

So I wait. The waves and the wind are muffled by the canvas of the tent, and I can hear as she draws a deep breath, then releases it through her nose. As she swallows, heavily, like she’s steeling herself. 

“I could… I could talk about it now.” Her voice is soft, barely a breath. “Unless you had any plans of going to sleep tonight.”

“Oh, no,” I say quickly. “No, I don’t ever need to sleep again.”

“I don’t know if it’ll be as riveting as your tale-”

“I don’t care. Whatever you want to tell me, I want to hear it - and if you don’t want to, you don’t have to-”

“I do want to.”

Ginny starts with the things I already knew - Luna being dragged off the train, her detention for trying to steal the sword of Gryffindor, Unforgivable Curse practice on first-years - as though she’s easing me into the narrative. Or perhaps easing herself into it. I know what it must take for her to open up like this, to make herself vulnerable, particularly as I’m the person who hurt her. But the longer she speaks, the more intense the relief is as it hits both of us. There was no way to talk around this, or shove it into the past until we’d gotten enough distance from it. The only way out was through.

The conversation drifts, eventually, to lighter and happier things. The words flow easily between us, just like they always have. It’s hard to believe that just weeks ago, I was at a complete loss for what to say to her. 

As the sky begins to lighten, sometime around four in the morning, Ginny’s eyelids drift closed in a suspiciously long blink. Then another, and another, until her features relax into sleep, her soft lips just barely parted. I don’t necessarily want to be the bloke watching the object of his affection sleep - we aren’t properly together so it borders on obsessive - but I’ve never seen her quite like this. All her walls are down. To see her content and at peace, after everything she’s just shared… it brings me peace too. 

I regain consciousness to the sensation of a small finger poking me in the shoulder, and open my eyes to see Ginny’s freckled face smirking at me. Judging by the light streaming in through the timeworn canvas, the sun has well and truly risen now.

Though I hadn’t meant to fall asleep, I am very, very happy to be waking up beside her.

“It’s late, isn’t it?”

My words barely croak out of my throat, making the corner of her mouth tilt up in amusement.

“Only just gone six,” she says. “But I think Ron and Hermione are awake already.”

Blinking sleep from my eyes, I push myself up to a sitting position. “We’d better get out there, then.”

“Probably.”

She sounds just as reluctant as I feel. 

After taking turns changing clothes in the bathroom (which, although tiny, does contain a clawfoot tub), we head out to the campsite. Ron and Hermione, looking exhausted and disheveled, have rekindled the fire, and an iron tea kettle sits in the middle of the flame.

“Well, well, well,” says Ron, words dripping with mock disapproval. “Look what the cat’s dragged in. Thought you’d make us miss the Portkey.”

“You could have left without us,” says Ginny brightly as she drops down to the ground and holds her hands out over the burgeoning fire. “We’d have been all right.”

As Ron sets about fixing two more cups of tea, Hermione catches my eye and flashes me a very small, subtle thumbs-up. I can’t even bring myself to be annoyed with her incessant fixation on my non-relationship, because I actually agree with her: this has been good. Really, really good.

There’s only time for a quick breakfast of tea and toast (which gives a delighted Ron one last chance to cook over the fire) before we have to begin packing up our campsite. Before long, I’m taking one last look at Iceland, at the cliffs and the waves and the massive Quidditch pitch which now stands empty, the burnt-out Hoover yanks us violently back to the basement kitchen of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.

Ron looks at his watch, decides he has time for a twenty-minute kip before we absolutely have to leave for the Ministry, and tugs Hermione up the stairs without further ado. Ginny looks at the fireplace, then at me, eyes still as bright and warm as they were in Iceland. Despite having slept a grand total of six hours in two days, I feel utterly energized just being with her.

“So,” she begins. “About your owl.”

I grin. “I don’t suppose he has a name yet, has he?” 

“Not yet,” she says sheepishly. “But I think it would help if I met him, is he here?”

“Yeah, unless he’s still out hunting, he should be around. We can check.”

At Ginny’s eager nod, I start towards the stairs. As has become his habit over the past thirty-one days that I’ve owned him, my owl is likely in my bedroom, sleeping inside his cage. Which, of course, means that Ginny is soon to be in my bedroom, and my stomach gives a little leap of excitement at the thought. All the intimate, personal things that have transpired this weekend could never have happened earlier this summer. It feels like everything has changed.

Of course, then I turn the doorknob. I’m not exactly used to visitors, and my room is messy in that way only an unsupervised teenager can achieve. Clothes lie strewn about the floor, the duvet is a rumpled pile in the center of the bed, and old magazines sit stacked on the bedside table next to dirty pint glasses.

“Sorry,” I say, cheeks burning as we step inside. “I wasn’t really - well-”

“I’ve got lots of brothers,” Ginny reminds me. “It’s not actually that bad - oh!” In the far corner, the owl is perched on the bar in his cage, his beak working at the bony remnants of what I assume was once a mouse. “Oh, he’s little!”

“He’s still rather young,” I say. “He’ll grow.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to call him Pigwidgeon Junior or anything,” she says with a smile. “Have you got any treats for him?”

I find the box of Owl Treats wedged between two training textbooks and pass them to her. After unhooking the door to the cage, Ginny lets the owl hop out onto her arm and strokes a hand over his fuzzy little feathers. 

“Hey, mate,” she says gently as his sharp yellow beak plucks a treat from her palm. “Don’t worry, I’ll pick a good name for you. We won’t let Ron call you Agamemnon, will we?”

“You know, I reckon you’re right,” I say as I watch them. “You’ve got to get to know him a little better before you can pick the right name for him. So…” As she looks over at me, I gather my courage to say what I’m about to say. “I was thinking maybe it would help if I sent him up to Hogwarts every so often, so you could see him. If that’s all right with you.”

Slowly, she nods. That blazing look, the one I’ve always loved, the one I’d thought of in what were meant to be my last moments, is back in her eyes. “Yes,” she says. “You absolutely should. The more the better.”

I am smiling like an idiot at her and I don’t even care. “Brilliant.”

Ginny tucks one last treat into the owl’s beak and then lets him hop from her arm back into his cage. “I really should get home soon,” she says with more than a little remorse in her voice. “Mum’ll start to worry, and I’ve still got a lot of packing to do.”

“Yeah, all right. I need to leave for training in a few minutes anyway.”

“Okay.” Stepping forward, Ginny wraps her arms around my neck, and automatically I hug her tightly back, cradling her small waist against my own. The moments march past, neither of us keen to separate. “Thanks for this weekend,” she says quietly. “I had a lot of fun with you.”

“I did too.”

She pulls back, leaving warmth burning where our bodies once touched. “Will I see you at the station tomorrow?”

“Yes,” I say instantly. My hands are still on her waist; I don’t want to let go. “Yes, I’ll be there.”


	6. Better Late Than Never

So the problem is, I didn’t think through the promise that I made to Ginny at all. The Hogwarts Express leaves Platform 9 and ¾ at exactly eleven in the morning on the first of September. This year that’s a Tuesday, and rather than boarding the train myself, I’m expected to be in my Stealth and Tracking class at the Ministry. I’m positive that Ron has no intention of missing out on Hermione’s last moments in London, and yet I can clearly picture the disapproval on her face if he were to bail on classes.

It’s bound to be a sensitive subject, but I broach it with Ron anyway, over roast beef sandwiches and bottles of sparkling water in the Ministry cafe. For someone who’s staring down the final hours and minutes until he has to separate from his girlfriend for weeks on end, he’s in decent spirits, if a little bit quiet, though that could just be the lack of sleep. 

“So what’s your plan for tomorrow?” 

He pauses, a crisp halfway to his mouth. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re seeing Hermione off, right?” At his nod, I add, “but we have class, so…”

“Yeah,” he says, unperturbed. “I’m taking a personal day.”

I suppose I was expecting talk of Apparating from a broom closet or the use of a contraband Time-Turner, because this solution is almost jarring in its logic and ease. “We get personal days?”

Laughing, Ron shakes his head and pops the crisp into his mouth. “Every Ministry employee gets them,” he says, “only because we’re in training we don’t get a ton, I think it’s only three. You know, ‘cause they don’t want us missing too much class. But once we’re certified, we’re meant to get the standard twenty-eight a year - that’s what my dad’s always got, anyway-” He laughs again. “Didn’t you pay any attention at orientation?”

I throw my hands up in defeat. “You’ve officially spent too much time with Hermione.”

“More like not enough,” he says ruefully before regaining himself and picking up his sandwich to take a bite. “Aren’t you coming with? I just assumed you would-”

“Yeah, well, I think Ginny wants me to,” I confess, watching anxiously as this registers with him. “Actually, I know she does, because she asked me if I would.”

“Take the day off, then,” says Ron like it’s so obvious - which, upon reflection, it very much is. “I really don’t think Robards is going to say no to you.”

“Right.” I take a drink of water as I contemplate this, and then can’t stop myself saying, “so really, we get personal days?”

“Well, yeah,” Ron chuckles. “What did you think, that you’d just work every single day of your life without a break?”

“I never really thought about it.”

And I hadn’t. These little luxuries have never really seemed like an option for me. There hadn’t ever been a break from the prophecy or the war or being the Chosen One, though sometimes with Ginny, it had felt that way. I just assumed that the rest of my life would go the way the first nearly-eighteen years went: snatching little bits of normalcy and joy when the realities of life allowed space for it. I never thought I’d get to the point where my life was truly mine to do with as I pleased.

“You had better do it now, if you’re going to,” Ron continues. “It’s just a form, Robards has them in his office.”

“Yeah, I will do, actually,” I say, standing up. “You want the rest of my sandwich?”

Ron rolls his eyes in amusement. “Just go.”

It’s like I knew somewhere deep down that I needed to make that happen, because the second I’ve filed my request with Robards, the exhaustion of the past few days hits me like a ton of bricks. My eyes barely stay open in my afternoon classes, and upon arriving home, I recline in the drawing room to listen to post-match coverage of the World Cup and fall asleep almost immediately. At some point, I’m vaguely aware of Ron and Hermione trying to invite me out to dinner, but I’m afraid that I just roll over and tell Ron to piss off. When I do wake, it’s to a darkened room, illuminated only by a shard of moonglow sneaking in through a gap in the curtains, with a horrible crick in my neck. I sit up, adjust my glasses so they sit level on my face, and squint at the face of my watch. It’s nearly eleven, and my stomach is roiling angrily with hunger.

Making my way to the kitchen, I find only various condiments and leftover pizza in the cooling cupboard. Given that I can’t even recall the last time we had pizza, I’m not willing to risk it - not when tomorrow is so important - and turn instead to the last few feeble slices of bread in the breadbin. I use my wand to toast them, dump a can of beans over them without bothering to heat them up, and sit myself down at the kitchen table to eat. I’m a bit regretting my decision to choose sleep over food.

In the center of the table sits the latest edition of the Daily Prophet. On the front page, clear as day, is my brightly beaming face, so I already know it’s a photo of me and Ginny at the World Cup. But I don’t care to read it. I’m not interested in whatever zippy headline the geniuses over at the Prophet have cooked up, or what sort of rumors they’re spreading. If Ginny isn’t fussed with it, I don’t see why I should be. I have much more important things with which to concern myself.

A creak sounds from the staircase, and seconds later, Hermione pads into the kitchen wearing a bathrobe that absolutely dwarfs her. 

“Hey,” I greet her, my voice cracking from lack of use. 

She pulls a glass from a cupboard and smiles at me. “Nice to see you up and about,” she says as she fills her glass at the sink. “When did you wake up?”

“Just now.” I take a bite of beans and toast. “Sorry I couldn’t make it to dinner. Where’d you two go?”

“Oh, we went with my parents to this Japanese restaurant in Kensington, as sort of a goodbye dinner. You should have seen Ron, he was so funny, he’d never had sushi before in his life but he was trying to be quite casual about it - anyway.” She shakes her head affectionately and takes a long drink from her glass. “Then we ended up at the Burrow for pudding - second pudding, really.”

“You went to the Burrow?!” My heart starts pounding. “You should have tried harder to wake me up - or sent a Patronus or something-”

“Oh, it’s no big deal,” she says, reassuring. “Ginny understood you were sleeping. She seemed quite knackered herself.”

“Still, if I’d known-”

“Well, I expect you were exhausted,” she says, now taking on that Hermione-ish tone that lets me know she’s about to pry into my personal business. “You had quite the night last night.”

“All we did was talk,” I reply, careful to keep my voice even. 

“Hmm.”

“Honestly.”

Ignoring this, Hermione begins filling a second glass at the sink. “So did anything transpire out of this...  _ talk _ ?”

A sigh heaves its way out of my chest. “I thought you promised to stop meddling.”

“I don’t recall doing that,” she says glibly, and I think a month ago, this would have annoyed the life out of me, but tonight I just laugh. There’s no changing Hermione, and even if I could, I wouldn’t want to. “Of course, you don’t  _ have  _ to tell me, it’s only if you want to-”

“There’s nothing to tell,” I say, even though last night was massive, groundbreaking, transformative. “She’s leaving tomorrow, there’s no point in… in getting my hopes up over anything.”

“Just because she’s leaving, that doesn’t mean - Harry, look.” Glass in hand, Hermione approaches the kitchen table. “I’ve honestly been doing my best to stay out of it, even though I really do just want to see you happy, and maybe I do get a bit carried away-”

“I know, I know-”

“But I’m not blind.” She tightens the belt of her robe around her waist and drops into the seat opposite mine. “I saw the way you were together yesterday. That’s not just friendship.”

“All right, but…” Picking up my toast, I take a bite and chew as my thoughts form themselves into words in my brain. “What if she was just caught up in everything? With the match and being in a foreign country and everything - and anyway, I don’t know why I’m even thinking about it, because she doesn’t want a boyfriend.”

Even as I speak the words, I question them. Ginny had been adamant, that day in the scullery, her eyes still shooting daggers at me, when she’d said so. I know enough about Ginny to know that she doesn’t say anything she doesn’t mean. But then… there was the way she huddled under that blanket at the match with me, when she could easily have left me out in the cold. Her face inches from mine in the darkness of the tent. That lingering hug in my bedroom, and her words when I mentioned writing to her at Hogwarts:  _ the more the better. _

I don’t even want to tell Hermione about any of it, lest it lose its quiet intimacy, its promise, its hope. It feels sacred, and if it’s all I’ll ever have, then I want to keep it all to myself.

“I might have said the same thing about myself six months ago,” Hermione says loftily. “Things change.”

“Yes, yes, I know.” I take another bite of toast. “You’re a relationship expert now.”

In a rare display of humility, Hermione just shrugs. “I don’t know about that. But I know you, I know Ginny, and I know what I saw. I think maybe…” Her teeth dig into her lower lip. “Harry, please don’t take this the wrong way.”

“Oh, no,” I say warily. “What?”

“I just think, sometimes…” She tilts her head, empathy written all over her face. She might be meddlesome and self-righteous and overbearing, but she only does it because she truly cares. “Sometimes it’s like you think you don’t deserve to be happy, so you just settle for whatever you’ve got.”

She interlocks her fingers together in front of her mouth, eyes fixed anxiously on me. Given past history, she’s probably expecting some sort of eruption, but though her words ring true, they don’t sting the way she fears they might. 

“It’s not about deserving,” I say after a moment’s consideration. “I think I’m just not used to having a choice.”

“Well, you do now, and I would just hate to see you choose something that’s good enough when you could be happy. Really, properly happy.”

My appetite for my slapdash breakfast-for-dinner vanishes as her meaning sinks in. All summer, I’ve needed prodding and coaxing to take the tiniest steps in any direction, and it’s because I’ve never had so much choice in my life. My future was determined for me before I was even born, and to choose any other way quite literally meant the end of the world. Growing up with the Dursleys conditioned me to accept what I could get, because it was better than nothing at all. Once I made it to Hogwarts, defeating Voldemort took priority over everything else. 

I could keep doing what I’m doing, and simply accept what I have now… but there is so much more out there.

“All right,” I say after several minutes’ silence. “Let’s say you’re right about all of this-”

“Which I am-”

“-she’s still leaving tomorrow.”

“Well,” says Hermione, unfazed. “Better late than never, isn’t it?”

With that, she rises from her chair and strides off towards the stairs, picking up that second glass of water as she goes.

•••

I haven’t been to King’s Cross in years. It’s strange, today, walking in without my clunky old Hogwarts trunk or Hedwig in her cage, without the expectation of Quidditch and dormitories and celebratory feasts in the Great Hall. Though I used to spend my summers eagerly anticipating the moment I stepped onto the train and departed for the first place that ever really felt like home, I am not sorry that all of this is about to unfold without me. I can only imagine what it is costing Hermione and Ginny to leave behind the new lives they’ve each built this summer and return to a place that has shown them such horror and loss.

We’ve arrived early. The train hasn’t even pulled into the station yet, and there’s only a few other families here, which consist mainly of anxious-looking first years and parents. Ron sets Hermione’s trunk down behind a brick pillar and we turn it into a makeshift bench, with Hermione perched on Ron’s lap. In her usual way, she starts talking at a mile a minute, chattering about the professors and her classes and wondering how Hagrid has been doing all summer, then lamenting that we haven’t visited him.

Ron just sits, his chin on her shoulder, and listens. He doesn’t take his eyes off her, even as the platform grows more louder and crowded. He just watches her. 

“And so I think for the prefect schedules,” Hermione’s saying, “I’m going to-“ She notices, finally, that he hasn’t stopped looking at her once. ”What?” 

“Nothing,” says Ron, “nothing at all.” 

As he moves in to kiss her, I look up to see Ginny approaching, a rucksack slung over one shoulder, trunk clasped in the opposite hand. Mrs. Weasley follows behind just seconds later.

Hermione and I both jump up, and Ron rises too, though more reluctantly, as Mrs. Weasley bustles over and doles out hugs and cheek kisses. Playfully rolling her eyes, Ginny greets me with a smile and kneels down in front of Crookshanks’ basket to scratch his ears through the wires. 

The massive clock on the wall reads a quarter to eleven; I barely have fifteen minutes left with her. I learned years ago that the more desperately you cling to the seconds you’ve got, and the harder you wish for time to slow down, the more quickly it slips away. That’s never been truer than it is right now. The second hand sweeping across the face of the clock is mocking me, a brutal reminder of every opportunity that I’ve squandered.

“I won’t stay long,” says Mrs. Weasley, smoothing down Ron’s collar to his deep chagrin, “I know you all can take care of yourselves, but - oh, Ginny,” she calls, “come here and let me say goodbye to you properly, it isn’t every day that my only daughter leaves for her final year at Hogwarts.”

Ginny straightens up from petting Crookshanks and lets her mother envelope her into what is surely a bone-cracking hug. 

“Now, you be good this year,” says Mrs. Weasley, worry plain on her careworn features. “This year isn’t all about Quidditch, you know.” She loosens her grip on Ginny, holding her at arm’s length. “Your exams are much more important - Hermione, dear,” she calls suddenly. “You’ll make sure she studies, won’t you?”

“I study perfectly well on my own,” retorts Ginny, affronted, before Hermione can respond. “I don’t need a babysitter-”

“Oh, I know, dear,” says Mrs. Weasley. “But you’ve got so much potential, I just don’t want you to be distracted like your brothers were.”

“Cheers,” mutters Ron dryly under his breath. 

“I’ll be fine, Mum,” says Ginny pointedly. “We probably need to get on the train soon, it’s going to fill up.”

Unable to argue with this, Mrs. Weasley hugs us all again in turn, even though Ron and I aren’t going anywhere and will probably turn up at the Burrow for dinner within the week, and then pats Ginny’s cheek one last time before stepping through the barrier once again.

“‘Be good’,” Ginny repeats disbelievingly, setting her trunk down opposite Hermione’s and seating herself upon it. Without a second’s consideration, I squeeze onto the small space beside her. “Honestly. You’d think I was eight years old.”

“You mean you’re not?” asks Ron, laughing when Ginny swings out a foot to kick him. “Oh come on, she just doesn’t want you throwing away your potential like your deadbeat older brothers have done.”

Ginny laughs. “I’ll do my best not to drop out.”

From her place beside him, Hermione picks up Ron’s wrist and frowns at the symbols skittering around the perimeter of his watch. “We really do need to get on the train soon,” she says. “I’ve got to speak to all the prefects, it really won’t do to be late to my own meeting.”

“Yeah,” says Ron, all mirth gone from his expression. “Yeah, all right.”

They exchange looks and then slink off to a more secluded section of the platform, leaving Ginny and I in charge of her trunk… and very much alone.

There are seven minutes left.

“I really wanted to get here sooner,” says Ginny, shifting about on the trunk so that her bent knee presses into my thigh. “But you know what it’s like trying to get anyone in my house to go anywhere, and Mum made me check through my trunk about a thousand times to make sure I’ve got all my books and quills and, you know, enough pairs of socks and everything. Oh, God, and then I couldn’t find Arnold-”

“You aren’t leaving him at home, are you?”

“Oh no, he’s in my trunk.” Ginny pats the side of it. “I put a Bubble charm around him so he can breathe, I’ll let him out once I’m on the train.”

“Well-” I’m briefly interrupted by the sound of the train’s engines as they rumble to life. “I’m glad I could come see you off, anyway. Though I have to say, it’s really strange being here and not actually getting on the train.”

“Are you sorry to be missing out?”

Even as I give a casual shrug, I can’t tear my eyes away from her. “There’s a few things I’ll miss.”

“Quidditch?” asks Ginny knowingly.

“Yeah, something like that.”

Why can’t I ever just say what I’m thinking? I have exactly six minutes left until that train pulls out of the station and I’m stuck in place, frozen like I have been all summer. The last thing I want is to go back to the way things were in July.

Ginny lets out a breath, her lips forming a nervous smile, and pulls her rucksack into her lap. Her fingers find the buckle holding it closed and fiddle with it, playing at unclasping it without ever actually doing so. “Erm, so I’ve been thinking-”

The words die on her tongue at the sound of a long, infuriated yowl: Hermione, having returned from wherever she and Ron had gone to snog, has just picked up Crookshanks’ basket.

“Oh, hush, you’re all right,” she tells him impatiently before fixing her attention on me and Ginny. “We’ve really got to get on the train, we’re running out of time.”

Ginny nods. “You go ahead. I’ll be there in a minute.”

I rise and allow Hermione to wrap me up in a brief, one-armed hug, then wish her a good term before we separate and she turns back to Ron. She leans up to him for a couple last-minute kisses, and then he picks up the handle of her trunk and walks with her towards the train.

Behind me, Ginny has stood up as well, and I turn on my heel to face her. “Were you going to say something?”

“Oh - yeah-” She purses her lips. “I really need to get my things on the train, though.”

“Right,” I nod, trying not to let on about the plummeting sensation in my stomach. I’ve missed my moment, it’s too late, and she’s about to be taken hundreds of miles away from me. “Er, I can help you bring your things over.”

She lets out a little laugh. “I’ve got it,” she says, “but you can come with me if you want.”

I’ll do anything if it’ll get me another few seconds with her, so I follow her over to the train, where she stops just outside one of the sliding doors. In the corner of my vision is Ron, leaning against a brick pillar with his arms folded over his chest. I don’t see Hermione anywhere.

Five minutes left. Five whole minutes to tell her… well, all of it, really. That I love her, that I always have, that I never stopped. That the night we spent at the Quidditch World Cup was one of the best of my life. That I hope it isn’t still ruined, that maybe we can still be something. That the future’s wide open, and I want her in mine.

How am I meant to do that in the space of five minutes?

"So, I’ve been thinking,” says Ginny, bringing her rucksack around in front of her and unbuckling it. “About those mirrors you gave me for my birthday.”

I blink, taken aback. “Oh. Yeah, I really hope they work - I’m sure Hermione’ll be able to fix it if they don’t-”

“No, no, it’s not that,” she says with a shake of her head, digging a hand into her bag. “So listen, I’ve been trying to decide who to give the other one to. Who I’ll want to talk to and who I’m going to miss the most, and, and I finally realized…” Her tongue darts out to lick her lips. “It’s you.”

As the words ring and echo around me, drowning out the whistle of the train and the clamor of the platform, she pulls a small, rectangular mirror out of her bag and presents it to me.

“I want to talk to you the most,” she says firmly. “I’m going to miss you the most.”

Wordlessly I take the mirror from her outstretched hand, and as our eyes lock, fire ignites in hers, and suddenly I know that I can’t wait another second. If I let her go now, I’ll always wonder what could have happened, and I don’t want to live my life wondering anymore. I don’t want to bide my time, waiting for something to happen, when everything I want and everything I need is right there in front of me. I understand her perfectly now, and I know without a shadow of a doubt that she and I want the same thing.

I duck my head and press my lips gently to hers, and her warmth floods through me. She rises up on tiptoe, bringing herself closer, her free hand grasping at my upper arm. She is the only thing I know: it’s only when our mouths slowly detach that I recall that I’m in a bloody train station, of all places, the blast of the whistle sharp in my ears. From elsewhere on the platform comes Ron’s raucous, disbelieving laughter.

_ Better late than never. _

Ginny’s face is flushed pink beneath the freckles dotting her cheeks. She’s still close to me, so close I can feel her warm breath on my lips (I’m quite certain that I’m not breathing at all), and her lips curve into a wide, warm smile.

“I have to go,” she breathes. “But, erm… we’ll talk tonight?”

“Yes. Yes, definitely.” 

My words come out strong and emphatic and I know I sound overeager, but I want her to know how much I want this, and how much she means to me. I don’t want to hold anything back anymore.

She leans in and touches her lips to mine once more, soft and light and sweet, and then drops down onto her heels. She picks up her trunk and walks slowly towards the train, looking back over her shoulder only once, to flash me a smile, and then she’s stepping onto the train and disappearing inside. Its wheels start rolling in the next instant, and I watch it until it’s gone.

It’s only once she’s out of sight that I notice Ron, still doubled over in amusement several feet away.

“Is something funny?” I ask him, though it’s hard to sound annoyed when I’m smiling ear to ear.

He straightens up, ambles over, and thumps me on the back, still laughing to himself. “Just Hermione,” he says with a shake of his head. “She’s going to be gutted she missed it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed coming along on Harry’s journey with me! I really did pour so much of myself into this fic and so when people connect with it, I can’t even put into words what it means. Thank you so much for reading!


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